Researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) have created a new and cheap way of studying one type of the human papillomavirus, the cause of genital warts and cervical cancer. This new process allows researchers to efficiently produce the virus for study and helps in understanding exactly how HPV functions. The strain of the virus they produced is HPV 18. This breakthrough is important because HPV is difficult to reproduce in the lab. This new method has allowed the scientists to actually recreate the infection cycle, allowing them to study the virus’s effects in more detail. While they have only used the method on HPV 18, one of the strains that can cause genital warts, they are optimistic that it can be used to produce and study many other strains of the virus as well.
Via Science Blog
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