A vaccine to prevent a type of cancer that kills more than 250,000 women around the globe every year is expected to become available within a year or two, thanks in large part to technology developed by scientists at the University of Rochester Medical Center.
Vaccines that prevent cervical cancer are in the final stages of testing in studies by two companies, Merck and Co. and GlaxoSmithKline (GSK). Earlier this month the two pharmaceutical giants agreed on a settlement involving patents and royalties related to the vaccines, clearing the way for continued development of their products.
The vaccine targets a group of viruses known as human papillomaviruses (HPV), which cause 12,000 cases of cervical cancer in women in the United States annually. About 4,500 women in the nation die of the disease every year. The toll is much worse in other parts of the world, where Pap smears to detect the disease in its earliest stages are not widely available. In some parts of the world, cervical cancer is the leading cause of death by cancer in women.
Research done more than a decade ago by a trio of University virologists – Richard Reichman, M.D., William Bonnez, M.D., and Robert Rose, Ph.D. – is integral to the technology, which takes aim at a portion of a class of viruses that also cause all warts. A patent application was filed, and the rights to the technology were licensed to the biotechnology company MedImmune, which then sold the license to SmithKline (which later became GSK). Now, the research is poised to save lives and become part of one of the first vaccines to prevent a form of cancer. (The hepatitis B vaccine can also prevent liver cancer.)
"The public health impact of this work – which has the potential to prevent a condition that causes significant morbidity and mortality in women – is enormous, both nationally and internationally," says David Guzick, M.D., Ph.D., dean of the School of Medicine and Dentistry and professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology.