This may come as a surprise, but there are many strains of communal HPV (human papillomavirus) that already live on your skin, helping make up what we know as the skin virome.
Recent research has found that immunity to these viruses may offer protection against skin cancer, notes Shawn Demehri, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor of dermatology at Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center Harvard Medical School and the director of the High-Risk Skin Cancer Clinic. That means in a not-so-distant future, there could be what is essentially a skin cancer vaccine.
“Our team is working to develop novel type vaccines for commensal HPVs in the skin—which boost T-cell immune response to HPV already living in our skin—so we can improve skin cancer prevention,” Demehri previously told me.
