Study Finds New Version of QIAGEN's HPV Test for Developing Countries Could Reduce Risk of Cervical Cancer by More than Half When Combined With Appropriate...(en women for cervical cancer riskproduci...),Health

The first clinical study of FastHPV to be reported, which was summarized at the conference in Beijing, was conducted as part of PATH's Screening Technologies to Advance Rapid Testing (START) project. It involved more than 2,500 women age 30-54 in mostly rural areas of China, where the World Health Organization has found that diseases are the cause of poverty for up to half of the population. Because cytology is not practical in such regions, the most common cervical cancer screening tool has been visual inspection with acetic acid (VIA), in which the cervix is painted with vinegar to better highlight any abnormal areas present, then examined by a healthcare professional. However, in this study, VIA was not very accurate; its sensitivity (ability to identify women who have severe, pre-cancerous cervical disease) was only 41 percent. In contrast, the sensitivity of FastHPV was 86-90 percent when samples of cervical cells collected by healthcare workers were used, and 72-81 percent when women collected their own samples using a vaginal collection device.

"Unlike other cancers, cervical cancer has a single, known cause: HPV. That makes the disease highly preventable -- if abnormal cells are found and treated early. This research clearly shows that the ability of FastHPV to accurately identify women with pre-cancerous cervical disease is substantially better than visual inspection and approaching that of the technology used for HPV DNA testing in high-resource countries (QIAGEN's proprietary hc2 platform)," concluded Professor Youlin Qiao, who led the China study and serves as Chief of the Department of Cancer Epidemiology at the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences. "FastHPV is very promising as a realistic method for public-health cervical cancer prevention programs in low-resource settings like many areas of rural China."

In a separate presentation in Beijing, John
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