Last month, Federica Inturrisi, Venetia Qendri and Hans Berkhof from the Decision Modeling Center visited the 32nd International Papillomavirus Conference (IPVC 2018), held in Sydney, Australia. This year, the conference theme was “Towards Global Control of HPV Disease” and covered papillomavirus (PV)-related topics from basic science to global health impact.

Federica presented recently collected data on “Five-year type-specific clearance of high-risk human papillomavirus in cervical cancer screening”. These data show that, after five years of viral persistence, the majority of women cleared the infection and most women without clearance showed clinical progression. The women that remained persistent still had a high chance to clear the infection, comparable to the first screening round. These findings may be important for management of women with HPV-positive and cytology-negative test results, whose follow-up strategy in a HPV-based cervical cancer screening program is still under debate.

Venetia presented the results of the recently published systematic review: “Pricing of HPV vaccines in European tender-based settings” (Qendri V, Bogaards J, Berkhof J, Eur J Health Econ. 2018). Vaccine price is one of the most influential parameters in economic evaluations of HPV vaccination. Vaccine tendering is a cost containment method widely used across Europe, but information on factors affecting tender-based HPV vaccine prices is scarce. This study found a fourfold decrease in tender-based vaccine prices compared to market introductory prices, which confirms the potential of tendering as an efficient cost-containment strategy and opens the way for expansion of immunization programs to previously ineligible target groups.

Hans Berkhof held two presentations. In the Public Health workshop, Hans discussed primary HPV screening in high-income countries and the possibility to extend screening intervals beyond five years as recently done in Sweden and the Netherlands. Hans also presented the results of a Dutch randomised paired screen-positive non-inferiority study on self-collected versus clinician-collected HPV samples (IMPROVE-study). The study shows that HPV testing using a clinically validated assay on self-collected samples has similar accuracy as HPV testing on clinician-collected samples. This finding supports the use of HPV self-sampling as a primary screening method in routine screening.

More information on the conference and full abstracts can be found at https://ipvc2018.org/