My Cancer Research Journey as a Story
By Ramadhani Chambuso
In clinical medicine, researchers believe that HIV/HPV co-infected women progress relatively rapidly to invasive cervical cancer.
But then, I thought that may be too general because others do not progress to the invasive disease regardless of their CD4 T cell counts or Anti-Retroviral drug use.
Therefore, what I did, was to find out if host immunity and molecular genetic variations with HIV/HPV co-infection may influence early cervical cancer development. Interestingly, I have discovered that specific immune genes in combination with HIV/HPV co-infection may influence cervical cancer development in South African Women.
Conclusively, these results enlighten our insight to the disease development, add new knowledge to the existing theories in Clinical Oncology and may change the screening and management of the disease to focus or target more on individualized molecular genetic variations for cervical carcinogenesis.
Hi Ramadhani,
I am just curious. Did you have controls, say those without any HPV/HIV co-infections and those with only one of these viruses?
Yes…we recruited 200 women from the same study population as healthy controls so as to compare with the cases.
Great! I am looking forward to the final results.