Human hsp70 and HPV16 oE7 fusion protein vaccine induces an effective antitumor efficacy.

The persistent infection by human papilloma virus (HPV) is considered to be the major risk factor of cervical cancer, which is one of the most common cancers in women worldwide. Millions of women are currently infected with high-risk HPV. Thus, it is urgent to develop therapeutic vaccines to eliminate established infection or HPV-related diseases. In the present study, we constructed a very promising therapeutic HPV16 protein vaccine of optimized E7 (oE7)/huhsp70 using human hsp70 linked to HPV16 oE7. Our results demonstrated that vaccination with the oE7/huhsp70 protein vaccine induced a very strong E7-specific CD8(+) T cell immune response and resulted in a significant therapeutic effect against E7-expressing tumor cells. Our study verifies that huhsp70 is an effective immune adjuvant in the development of tumor therapeutic protein vaccines, and emphasizes that homologous huhsp70 is a promising tool in future human clinical applications.