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Received Apr 6, 2017; Revised Jun 10, 2017; Accepted Jul 3, 2017
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
1. Introduction
Breast cancer claims most deaths of women suffering from cancer worldwide; the incidence of breast cancer and mortality of cases with carcinoma has increased gradually in recent years [1, 2]. It has been proven that the incidence of human breast cancer is related to such factors as lifestyle, medical conditions, oncogenic genes, and virus infection [3–8]. Human papillomaviruses (HPVs) are small DNA viruses with high affinity for epithelia. HPVs are classified into low risk (LR) and high risk (HR) according to their pathogenicity. Among the HPV genotype of high risk, HPV16 is the most prevalent. The integration of HPV16 DNA promotes a constitutive high expression of E6 oncoproteins and results in the extensive proliferation of the infected epithelial cells. Recently, HR-HPVs, especially HPV16, has been indicated to be involved in the pathogenesis and development of breast cancer. However, the detection rate varies with regions [9, 10]. Some prophylactic vaccines to prevent the cancer by HPV16 have been developed [11]. Unfortunately, their effects are still unsatisfactory to most of the cases infected with HPV.
Cyclooxygenase-2 (COX-2) is an important isoform of COX which functions as catalyzer in the synthesis of prostaglandins (PG) from arachidonic acid [12]. COX-2 is undetectable in most normal tissues but is upregulated in many malignancies, including breast cancer [13]. A strong correlation between COX-2 and carcinogenesis has been confirmed by carcinogen-induced animal models in recent studies, which indicates that COX-2 plays an important role in tumor promotion. COX-2 can promote the proliferation, angiogenesis, invasiveness, metastasis and inhibition of apoptosis, and immunosurveillance [14]. Celecoxib is a selective COX-2 inhibitor, and it can also be used to...