India can eliminate cervical cancer ‘in our lifetime’
THE LOW cost of the latest HPV vaccine with high-throughput manufacturing facilities puts India in a position to supply them globally and domestically to help eliminate cervical cancer ‘in our lifetime,’ an Indian public health scholar at Harvard has said.
‘India has a safe human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine.
It is a powerful tool to prevent cervical cancer and save lives. India has a nationwide screening program that can eliminate cervical cancer in ‘our lifetime,’ said Dr Mrinalini Darswal from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
‘The low cost of the Indian HPV vaccine with the availability of high-throughput manufacturing facilities puts us in a position to supply HPV vaccines globally and help save millions of precious lives. We demonstrated such leadership with Covid-19 vaccines recently, earning the admiration of the world,’ Darswal, a 2002 batch IAS officer, said.
Darswal was the Commissioner, Food Safety; Drugs Controller; Project Director, National AIDS Control Programme, Special Secretary Health, and Family Welfare and Member Secretary of the Coordination Committee on Juvenile Drug Addiction, Government of Delhi. Before coming to Harvard, she moved to the University of Texas (UT) at Austin for a Master’s in Economics.
‘As a mother of a nine-yearold daughter and a physician myself, I was one of the first in line to get the HPV vaccine shot when it was first made available in India in 2014. We got three doses each. The latest vaccines offer close to 100 per cent protection with a single shot,’ she said.
The latest vaccine she referred to is the ‘Cervavac’, India’s first indigenous HPV vaccine that can prevent cervical cancer and other HPV-associated cancers. Developed and manufactured by Pune-based Serum Institute of India (SII), this vaccine is soon to be included in India’s national immunization program in 2024.
A study, published in November 2023 in The Lancet Oncology, which evaluated the immunogenicity and safety of a quadrivalent HPV vaccine in the 9–14 years cohort has pointed out the need for a wider range of affordable and accessible vaccines against human papillomavirus (HPV) to meet global cervical cancer elimination efforts. ‘We observed a non-inferior immune response with this quadrivalent HPV vaccine in girls and boys aged 9–14 years and an acceptable safety profile compared with the comparator vaccine,’ it said.