Mucosally-derived HPV-40 can infect both human genital foreskin and cutaneous hand skin tissues grafted into athymic mice

HPV-40 is a rare HPV type that has been detected only in genital mucosal tissues. This HPV type is very closely related to HPV-7, which has a predominantly cutaneous tissue tropism. We have shown, previously, that an isolate of HPV-40 (described here as HPV-40(Hershey) or HPV-40(H)) productively infected genital tissues. In this study, HPV-40(H) was tested for productive infection of cutaneous tissue. Fetal hand skin fragments were incubated with infectious HPV-40(H) and implanted subrenally into athymic mice. After 120 days, xenografts showed morphological changes consistent with HPV-40(H) infection and were HPV-40 DNA in situ positive and capsid antigen positive. The results demonstrated that hand skin can support HPV-40(H) infection thereby indicating that this viral type has the capacity to infect both genital mucosal and cutaneous tissues.