Newswise — Today 69 top U.S. cancer centers, including Seattle's Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, issued a statement urging for increased HPV vaccination for the prevention of cancer. These institutions collectively recognize insufficient vaccination as a public health threat and call upon the nations’ physicians, parents and young adults to take advantage of this rare opportunity to prevent many types of cancer.

The vaccine’s roots lie in the laboratory of Dr. Denise Galloway, associate director and member of the Human Biology Division at Fred Hutch, as well as laboratories in Australia and the National Institutes of Health, where Galloway and fellow investigators accomplished the groundbreaking step of getting a key viral gene to assemble into particles that look like HPV, which became the basis of the vaccine.

Galloway and colleagues began studying HPV’s utility as a tool for understanding how normal cells turn abnormal. Viruses disrupt cellular pathways in much the same way as cancers do, so studying them illuminates parallel cellular processes.

In 1992, Galloway made a breakthrough discovery when she and her colleagues found that they could use one viral gene, called L1, from the same type of HPV that causes plantar warts, and get it to self-assemble and form virus-like particles. This eventually led to the development of virus-like particles for the cancer-causing types of HPV, which then became the underpinning of the vaccine.

“When I joined Fred Hutch in 1978, we didn’t know what caused cervical cancer, and now we have a vaccine that can prevent HPV infections and the cancers they cause. It is incredibly gratifying to have been part of that discovery,” Galloway said. “Wouldn’t it be great if there was a high rate of vaccine usage to actually eliminate HPV-caused cancers?”