Significance of human papillomavirus 16/18 infection in association with p53 mutation in lung carcinomas

Introduction: The role of high-risk human papillomavius (HPV) 16/18 in the development of lung cancer has recently been explored, and p53 mutation is a finding in lung cancer; however, its association with HPV infection is not well studied. Objectives: To investigate HPV 16/18 infection and p53 mutation in lung carcinomas and their association with tumor behavior. Methods and Results: We expanded our prior study to include 107 squamous cell carcinoma (SCC), 63 adenocarcinoma (AC) and 91 non-cancer control cases of lung from a population of Western China. The results confirmed that HPV infection is more prevalent in SCC (59.8%) comparing with that of AC (17.5%) and the control cases (23.1%) (P<0.001), and genotyping demonstrated predominant HPV 16/18 infection in the carcinomas and HPV 6 in the control cases. By immunohistochemistry, p53 mutation was detected in 67.3% of SCC and 60.3% of AC, in comparison with 9.9% in the control (P<0.001). Within the group of SCC, the p53 mutation rate is significantly higher in those with HPV infection (78.1%) than that of the non-infected carcinomas (51.2%, P=0.004). However, this difference is not proven to be significant in the groups of AC and the controls. Clinicopathological analysis demonstrated that the coexistence of p53 mutation and HPV infection was associated with lymph node metastasis (P=0.001) and high-clinical TNM stage of SCC (P=0.001). As there was no sequencing data, the evidence for HPV 16/18 E6 induced p53 mutation is still indirect. Conclusion: This study indicates that p53 mutation and HPV 16/18 infection might coordinate in the development of lung squamous cell carcinomas, and their coexistence is associated with poor prognosis. Please cite this paper as: Yu Y, Yang A, Hu S, Zhang J and Yan H. Significance of human papillomavirus 16/18 infection in association with p53 mutation in lung carcinomas. Clin Respir J 2013; 7: 2733.