HPV-Related Cancers Research Projects
MOON SHOTS PROGRAM
- Cancer Types
- HPV-Related Cancers
- HPV-Related Cancers Research
HPV-Related Cancers Priority Projects
The HPV-Related Cancers Moon Shot® addresses crucial issues faced by patients with cancers caused by HPV including cervical, oropharyngeal, anal, penile, vaginal and vulvar cancers. Through its research projects, the Moon Shot is focusing its largest efforts on projects with near‐term measurable success and developing more effective treatment approaches for patients.
Targeted therapies
Proteins produced by HPV, known as E5, E6, and E7, are responsible for driving and maintaining the malignant phenotype of these cancers. Although these viral proteins make excellent therapeutic targets because they are without human counterparts, there are currently no effective therapeutics targeting E6 or E7 function. Through this flagship, we are addressing this unmet clinical need by investigating multiple approaches to target and/or inhibit HPV E6 and E7 function or unique susceptibilities created by their function.
Additional goals include:
- Exploring the therapeutic potential of small molecules that inhibit the direct interaction between E6 and host proteins
- Facilitating the development of a monoclonal antibody that will recognize the specific viral E7 peptides displayed by a particular type of MHC class I molecules
Immune therapies
The overall goal of this flagship is to develop strategies to understand the function of T cells that remain reactive to HPV peptides or antigens. We are especially focused on identifying and characterizing the markers of activation and exhaustion of these immune cells, which may be used to develop rational combination immunotherapies or to adapt standard therapies, including radiation.
Additional goals include:
- Performing comprehensive cellular and molecular analyses of the immune cells that comprise the microenvironment of HPV-positive cancers
- Determining the role of viral antigens and novel host antigens and their contributions to patients’ responses to standard treatment and immunotherapy
- Characterizing the microbiome of HPV cancers that respond to treatment
Biomarker discovery
This flagship is aimed at creating an infrastructure to support uniform, prospective collection of annotated clinical data and biospecimens, which will provide a rich resource for future hypothesis-driven research. Centralized collection and banking of patient-derived samples will help overcome the limitations that currently constrain analysis across diseases and will accelerate the development of therapeutic approaches which are driven by biology rather than site of origin.
Additional goals include:
- Developing a program that will allow for uniform collection of biospecimens from patients with HPV-associated cancers
- Developing and validating a prognostic biomarker-based assay for HPV-positive cancers that may be developed into a routine clinical assay to improve patient morbidity