gardasil
Globally lauded cervical cancer vaccine Gardasil was developed at the Go8’s University of Queensland (UQ)
UniQuest, UQ’s commercialisation company licensed the Gardasil intellectual property to CSL Ltd in Melbourne which sub-licensed it to US based Merck & Co. Inc – one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world, in 1996. Today it is Merck’s top vaccine by sales.
Australia became the first country in the world to roll out a national cervical cancer immunisation campaign, to protect young women from the strains of human papillomavirus (HPV) that cause 70 per cent of cervical cancers.
Cervical cancer is the second most common cancer in women, estimated to kill about 275,000 women each year. Now Gardasil is used in more than 130 countries and has led to an up to 90 per cent decrease in the prevalence of HPV in countries with high levels of immunisation.
Gardasil also protects males against HPV and teenage boys are now also being vaccinated. In the US it has been recommended for males since 2011.
Professor Ian Frazer an immunologist, and Chinese virologist the late Dr Jian Zhou, created virus-like particles that could mimic HPV but were non-infectious, activating the body’s immune response and protecting against future infection.
Professor Ian Frazer said he was simply in the right place at the right time. “I just happened to be in the right lab in Melbourne, with the right people around me and the right prompt,” he said.
That’s the other thing about science, it’s a lot of hard work but … also, you have to have luck. We realise now that about 20 per cent of cancers are caused by virus infections. We picked a winner … because we picked a cancer that was caused by an infection. It’s much easier to prevent an infection.”
Emeritus Professor Ian Frazer
University of Queensland
The vaccine will have enormous economic benefits also with a significant reduction in the health system costs associated with preventing and treat ing cervical cancer, anal cancer and genital wart treatments and ongoing surveillance of affected patients after treatment.
In late 2014, the FDA approved the next generation 9 valent vaccine, Gardasil 9, which protects against an additional nine high-risk HPV types and could potentially increase the protection rate for cervical cancer to around 90 per cent.
It has also been noted that there has been a dramatic reduction in genital warts since the intro duction of the vaccine – a reduction of over 80 per cent in new presentations with genital warts amongst young women and men.
There is particular interest worldwide that the current vaccines could also assist with reducing the levels of other cancers associated with HPV such as some neck and head cancers – and whether the vaccine might also prevent re-infection after successful treatment for HPV associated disease, and therefore avoid the need for ongoing surveillance of women treated for the infection.
Observations from the past decade are that the HPV vaccines if delivered effectively to the majori ty of 10–12 year-old girls in the developing world from today forward should lead to the global elim ination of new cervical and HPV associated cancers by 2050.
The current challenge is how to deliver universal vaccination in the developing world, where cervical cancer incidence is high and strategies for prevention are non-existent or ineffective.
Drug manufacturing companies have sharply re duced their vaccine charges for the developing world to assist, and there are further subsidies for countries with an annual GDP of less than US$1580 a person