The culmination of five years of research at the Ames Laboratory has turned up a groundbreaking discovery concerning the human papillomavirus and how it relates to cervical cancer.

Jiangwei Li, graduate student in chemistry, Edward Yeung, distinguished professor of chemistry, and Ji-Young Lee, former graduate student, developed a way to examine viruses as individual bright spots on a microscope.

“By counting the bright spots, we can count how many virus products there are in a sample,” Yeung said. “Even if there’s only one, we can detect it.”

This enables the earliest possible diagnosis of cervical cancer, he said.

This discovery, Li said, will likely be widely commercialized within the coming years as a way to detect cervical cancer as part of a woman’s annual Pap smear.Yeung said it is beneficial to administer the HPV vaccine after the detection of the virus. The school of thought that everybody should be vaccinated for the virus is pushed by companies who want to sell their drug, he said. The administration of the vaccine can be dangerous since reactions to the vaccine and contamination can cause unpredictable results.

“Even though there are vaccines, we should not use them blindly,” Yeung said. “We should have them on hand and use them when there is early positive diagnosis.”

HPV is a leading cause of cervical cancer.

Often, Li said, cervical cancer has no symptoms and is very hard to detect until it has progressed to the point of being untreatable. The results of the research provide a method that is a “good way for early diagnosis,” Li said.

“It has huge potential,” she said.

The initial intent of the researchers was to study HIV, but acquiring research samples involves a lot of biosafety issues and, in turn, a lot of paperwork, Li said. Instead, the research team chose HPV, hoping findings of its research would eventually be applicable to HIV.

“With the concept we outlined, it’s clear enough that other highly controlled labs can test HIV,” Yeung said.