“One Screen” Cervical Cancer Control – Center for Health Decision Science

CHDS faculty Nicole Campos and a team of researchers at the National Cancer Institute (NCI), including Principal Deputy Director of the NCI Douglas Lowy, Senior Investigator Mark Schiffman, and co-leader of the HPV-AVE (PAVE) Study Consortium Silvia de Sanjosé, outlined a “one dose, one screen” cervical cancer prevention approach for lower-resource settings published in the Journal of National Cancer Institute Monographs.

One-dose prophylactic HPV vaccination of pre-adolescents may reduce cervical cancer deaths dramatically, but the benefits of achieving immediate high coverage in lower-resource settings would not be realized for 20 to 40 years. However, a scalable high-quality cervical screening approach could prevent hundreds of thousands of deaths while we await the benefits of vaccination.

In the article, the authors describe a time-limited “one screen” campaign approach involving once-in-a-lifetime HPV testing of self-collected samples using a low-cost accurate HPV test, with subsequent triage relying on extended genotyping and a validated deep-learning algorithm for automated visual evaluation (AVE) to stratify management based on risk to provide treatment for those most likely to develop cancer without overburdening health care systems. Early efficacy of this approach has been demonstrated within the HPV-AVE (PAVE) Study Consortium. Efforts to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of this approach are underway.

Learn more: Read the article, A Cervical Cancer Control Strategy for Lower-Resource Settings: Interventions to Complement One-Dose HPV Vaccination
Learn more: Read the full issue from Journal of the National Cancer Institute Monograph, State of the Science of Single-Dose Prophylactic HPV Vaccination
Learn more: Read about the PAVE Study Consortium, Design of the HPV-Automated Visual Evaluation (PAVE) Study: Validating a Novel Cervical Screening Strategy