The study I am presenting is a study about squamous cell carcinoma penile tumours. We included 53 patients. Bolivia is a high HPV prevalence country and also high prevalence penile cancer. So we included these 53 patients to study the outcomes and also the HPV relation.

What was the study design?

We conducted an ambivalent study. We had a retrospective cohort from 2018-2023 and our prospective cohort was from 2023-2025. These are the first outcomes, we are still recruiting.

What were the results?

We had some concerning but important results. First of all, two-thirds of our patients were diagnosed in a very advanced stage, at stage 3-4, so this reflects late diagnosis, maybe an important gap in our health system. We also had 43.4% of the tumours related to HPV. To accomplish this we explored the p16 immunohistochemistry as a biomarker of HPV infection. So this shows that HPV is a very important related factor to penile cancer in our cohort.

We also stratified our patients by the risk prognostic factor, by Cubilla, and this risk index joins the nodal commitment and also the pathological features. Our study shows that it is very important in our setting to have this index to evaluate the nodal commitment.

Last but not least, our real-world data contributed to the inclusion of HPV vaccination in males last year in our country.

Is there anything else you would like to add?

Yes, we are now genotyping the HPV. We didn’t have that when we conducted the study so we are now doing this. I think that would be very important for us to know which type of HPV is actually related to these tumours. We also are exploring the p53 relation to the prognostics of these tumours.