Human papilloma viruses (HPVs) infect squamous epithelia and generate warts. They are passed by direct contact; genital HPV infections are sexually transmitted. HPV infection rates are higher in women who have had a higher number of sexual partners (particularly male partners); do not use barrier methods of contraception; and who started having sex at a younger age.

There are more than 100 types of HPV. All can interfere with host-cell machinery that prevents cells from growing and replicating excessively, which are some of the cellular mechanisms that help protect the body against cancer development. Low-risk HPVs cause genital warts; high risk HPVs cause squamous intra-epithelial lesions that can progress to invasive squamous cell carcinoma. The majority of human cervical cancers are associated with high-risk HPV infections. Four subtypes of this virus account for 80 percent of all cervical cancer.

Cervical cancer, which is caused by HPV, is diagnosed in 11,000 women each year in the United States and the disease kills about 4,000 women annually in the USA.  A study led by researchers from Korea University College of Medicine in Seoul, Korea in the year 2010 suggests that dietary supplements may be taken to reduce risk of cervical cancer (Ref). To be specific, the study found that taking vitamin supplements reduced risk of cervical intraepithelial neoplasia or cervical dysplasia, which has a small chance of becoming cervical cancer. Cervical intraepithelial neoplasia is caused by chronic infection of the cervix with the sexually transmitted HPVs.

HPV infection tends to remain dormant, and with repeated infection, the HPV genome becomes integrated within the host cell genome and some cells may become cancerous.

Most HPV infections do not become persistent, and most persistent HPV infections do not lead to cancer. However, HPV infection is demonstrably present in 99 percent of women with cervical cancer, and may be present but undetected in the remainder. HPV is a necessary while not sufficient cause of cervical cancer.

There is some limited evidence that eating vegetables and fruits can protect against persistence (Ref). There is also evidence that folate can reduce persistence and independently reduce the risk of precancerous lesions in high-risk HPV infected women (Ref).

FDA and EU approved Gardisil for men to prevent genital warts resulting from HPV. GlaxoSmithKline has developed a vaccine called Cervarix for cervical cancer which has been approved some places and is in approval process elsewhere.

  Glioblastoma, the most common and aggressive type of brain cancer claimed the life of Sen. Edward Kennedy and 17,000 others every year. Conventional treatments have never offered much help to patients with brain cancer.

We need alternative treatments, using the immune systems. Just like the vaccines we give for measles, mumps and the flu, the idea is to prevent cancer from coming back. Dr. Andrew Parsa, a University of California at San Fransisco (UCSF) neurological surgeon who is leading the study of the vaccine, called Oncophage, with $150,000 in funding from the National Brain Tumor Society and other patient groups and another $150,000 from the federal government. Dr. Parsa is testing that theory with a ground-breaking clinical trial at UCSF Medical Center. Working with a biotech company, his team used a piece of Wheatley's tumor, to create a vaccine engineered to target specific cancer. A woman Joyce Wheatley became the first in the country to try a new vaccine to stop a brain tumor from reoccurring. The idea is to combine the tumor vaccine early, while the cancer is being weakened by chemotherapy and radiation. The hope is patients will then be able to manage the disease using their own immune system.

Traditional chemotherapeutic drugs don't work well in combating this type of cancer. Part of the problem is the body's blood-brain barrier, which is designed to shield the organ from chemicals - but also blocks lifesaving therapies from reaching it. Tumor cells also become quickly resistant to medicines. Vaccines, also called immunotherapies, take a different approach. Using a multistep approach, they are created from a patient's own tumor. The vaccine actually provokes a tumor-specific immune response that is patient specific. T-cells, the killer compound of the immune system, track down the cancer and try to kill it.

The approach seems counterintuitive - if the body's natural immune response could combat the cancer, the tumor should have perished and never needed treatment. A more vigorous defense is needed. If it works, it will reinvigorate a strategy for treating cancer that has long held conceptual promise but has proved difficult to deliver.

Many experimental vaccines have stumbled in clinical trials and none is yet approved in the United States. One of the greatest disappointments was in 2005, when final testing of the anti-melanoma vaccine Canvaxin showed that people getting the drug did not live longer than those getting the placebo. This year, a drug named Provenge, an immunotherapy for prostate cancer, has been shown to lengthen life for four months but has not yet earned approval by the U.S. Federal Drug Administration.

Scientists say that one challenge is that most drugs in development are first evaluated in patients with fairly advanced cancer - but many of these patients are so sick that they're immune-suppressed. Cancer vaccines may work better when the tumor is smaller. Scientists also say that ‘one should have to have the right type of vaccine, the right type of cancer, the right type of patient and the right type of environment to cure’.