Cross Sectional Association of the Oral Microbiota and the Inflammasome with Oral HPV among HIV+ Adults

PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT HPV-infection is the most common sexually transmitted disease (STI), and it accounts for 70% of oropharyngeal cancers.

People living with HIV (PLWH) are disproportionately affected by HPV and are also at an increased risk of cancer development, even with suppressive antiretroviral therapy (ART), suggesting that ART may not fully recover oral HPV-specific immunity.

Therefore, understanding other underlying factors that could facilitate the transmission and persistence of HPV in PLWH is crucial for the development of cancer prevention and surveillance strategies, and reduce the burden of HPV-associated malignancies in PLWH.

The oral microbiota and inflammasome protein complex are essential factors for maintaining immune homeostasis factors, which are altered by HIV infection and have been observed in the pathogenesis of oropharyngeal cancer. Thus they represent novel targets for biomarker discovery and therapeutics.

Our long-term goal is to investigate how these factors could contribute to immune dysregulation, and may affect the natural history of oral HPV infection in PLWH, in order to establish a set of early detection markers for HPV-related malignancies and personalized treatment interventions.

We hypothesize that dysbiosis of the oral microbiome and inflammasome dysregulation can be risk factors for HPV-related complications and can contribute to the dampening the immune system promoting subsequent inflammation in PLWH. This cross-sectional study plans to recruit 200 virologically suppressed PLWH (men and women ?21 and