Renewal: HPV and the DNA Damage Response

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Human papillomaviruses (HPV) are the causative agents of cervical, anal and many oral cancers. While prophylactic vaccines have been developed to prevent HPV infections, there is no effective therapeutic treatment for existing HPV lesions. It is therefore of critical importance to understand how the productive life cycle of high- risk HPVs is regulated to identify potential new therapeutic targets. HPVs infect stratified squamous epithelia and link their productive life cycles to the differentiation of the infected cell. My laboratory demonstrated that the amplification of HPV genomes in differentiating cells is dependent on activation of two DNA damage repair (DDR) pathways: the ataxia-telangiectasia mutated (ATM) kinase pathway as well as the ataxia telangiectasia and Rad3-related (ATR) pathway. We have identified members of these pathways that are important for the HPV life cycle and characterized many critical activities. We determined that in HPV positive cells the ATR binding protein, TopBP1, activated expression of DNA damage repair factors along with p73 while additional ATR factors, p62/GATA4, controlled expression of cytokines as well as IFNκ. Further work demonstrated that HPV proteins induced high rates of DNA breaks in both cellular and viral DNAs. The breaks in viral genomes were shown to be rapidly repaired through the preferential recruitment of homologous recombination repair factors such as RAD51 and BRCA1 to episomes and away from cellular sites of damage. This preferential repair resulted in genome amplification while at the same time permitting accumulation of breaks in cellular loci. The topoisomerase TOP2β induces DNA breaks to relieve torsional stress caused by transcription and replication. We determined that TOP2β levels were substantially increased in HPV positive cells and that this was responsible for the generation of a majority of breaks in HPV positive cells. Importantly knockdown of TOP2β impaired activation of DDR pathways and blocked viral replication. Additional work showed that HPV positive cells contain enhanced levels of R-loops which are trimeric complexes of RNA and DNA that lead to stalled replication forks and DNA breaks. R-loops were detected on HPV genomes in undifferentiated cells but resolved upon differentiation suggesting they may help in regulating viral functions. In this application, we will investigate how ATR regulates the stable maintenance of viral episomes in undifferentiated cells along with what determines which cells that undergo amplification upon differentiation. Additional work will examine which DDR and replication factors associate with amplifying genomes and how these pathways are activated. The overall goal of our studies is to understand how members of the DNA damage repair pathways regulate the differentiation- dependent HPV life cycle.