[Biology of papillomavirus infections. IV. Sero-epidemiological data]

Serological assays using synthetic peptides or recombinant proteins to identify specific HPV infection either fail to correlate with the type of infection or are only able to identify a small percentage of infected individuals. But genetically engineered Virus Like Particles (VLP) seem useful to develop Elisas for serological diagnosis of HPV infection and antibodies to VLP appear to correlate well with HPV DNA presence. The levels of secretory immunoglobulins in genital secretions would provide a better indicator of HPV infection, but reproducibility and standardization of the detection methods are unresolved. The clinical relevance of serologic responses is still questionable, since frequency and titer of several types of antibodies generated against HPV show a great variability which is dependent on the HPV type specificity, on the recognized epitopes and on the type of samples. However the detection of neutralizing antibodies associated with disease recurrence and antibodies raised against HPV16 E6 and E7 peptides found to react with sera of cancer patients, needs to pay attention.