Immunization of mice with plasmids coexpressing HPV16 E5 and the novel oncogene hWAPL

The novel human oncogene hWAPL is associated with uterine cervical cancer. The HPV16 E5 oncoprotein could induce genomic instability in normal human cells. However, the mechanism of E5 interaction with hWAPL still awaits definition. In our present studies, the eukaryotic expression plasmids, pcDNA3-hWAPL and pcDNA3-hWAPL-E5 were constructed and carried out to vaccinate mice directly. The result that indicated the polyclonal antibody titer in immunized mice sera was increased by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay. In addition, the proliferative responses of immunized mice spleen cells showed the optical densities values in vaccinated group remarkably higher than that in the control group. In conclusion, the recombinant plasmids could induce strong humoral and cellular immune response and exhibited great potential as therapeutic targets in the treatment of cervical cancer. However, the result didn't show significant difference in group with coexpression of HPV16 E5-hWAPL and group with only hWAPL expression. Consistent with these observations, we demonstrated that HPV16 E5 was not the optimal factor to cooperate with hWAPL in gene therapy.