Telomerase activation and incidence of HPV in human gastrointestinal tumors in North Indian population.

The present study was initiated with the objective of finding out the role of possible factors in the etiology of gastrointestinal tract cancers. HPV-DNA was detected in 62.5% (25/40) of the patients by PCR. Telomerase activity as shown by TRAP-ELISA assay was detected in 82.5% (33/40) of the tumor samples and absent in 85.7% (30/35) of the normal samples taken from the same patients. As many as 53.6% (15/28) of the invasive cases were positive both for telomerase activity and for HPV, while 39.3% (11/28) of them, although indicating telomerase expression, showed no signal for HPV. This suggests that activation of telomerase could be by a pathway independent of HPV activation, although both parameters could act as diagnostic and prognostic markers for gastrointestinal tract cancers.