“…HPV has not been found to be a substantial contributor to induction of OLK, with some studies failing to detect it in a wide variety of populations over a long timeframe (Sundberg et al, 2019; Sundberg et al, 2020), while others have shown only very low positive rates of detection (<5%) with no difference to normal or OSCC samples (Della Vella et al, 2020; Yang et al, 2019). Pooled estimates of HPV prevalence in OLK (20.2%) and PVL (24.7%) were no different to other potentially malignant conditions, such as oral lichen planus (23.0%) and oral submucous fibrosis (28.6%), and were independent of OED (de la Cour, Sperling, Belmonte, Syrjänen, & Kjaer, 2020). HPV has not been found to be a driver of oncogenesis or a contributor to MT of OLK, although overexpression of p16INK4A in dysplastic epithelium has been noted (Wu et al, 2019), but found not to be HPV‐dependent (Tomo et al, 2020).…”