▲ | epistasis 4 days ago | |
Yes, Michael Douglas had a throat cancer he said was from "oral sex" meaning HPV infection, and I remember social media berating him for saying that as if it were impossible, but it really is. Random anecdote: with whole genome sequencing, which is fairly common among the rich with cancer, you can sometimes find the exact cancer driving genes that the HPV has amplified. I remember looking at one case where the HER2 gene was amplified with many copies, and you could see it attached to chunks of HPV genome. Fortunately there's now many drugs that specifically target amplified HER2, originally developed only for breast cancer, where there are diagnostic test to find the subset of breast cancers with the amplification. |