Immunogenicity and safety of Cervarix HPV-16/18 AS04-adjuvant vaccine against HPV induced cervical cancer in women (15+ years)

Abstract

Background: The incidence of cervical cancer has decreased by over 50% from the mid-1970s to the mid-2000s. This is due in part to an increase in screening, which can identify cervical changes before they turn cancerous. Decreasing incidence rates in young women may be due to the use of the HPV vaccine. There are currently three types of HPV vaccines on the market: bivalent, quadrivalent and nine-valent HPV vaccines. These are administered in three-doses to both sexes from age 15 upwards to prevent HPV infection. Many medical systems support the vaccination of teenage girls and boys with HPV vaccines during their secondary school years in order to reduce the incidence of HPV-related cervical cancer in women. Despite the discovery of the link between HPV and cervical cancer in 1985, the beginning of vaccine production in 2002, and promotion of screening procedures since the 1960’s, cervical cancer is still the fourth most common cancer in women worldwide today. Objective: This review aims to analyse the immunogenicity and safety of Cervarix®, also known as HPV-16/18 AS04-adjuvant vaccine, in women (15+ years) against cervical cancer. Methods: The literature review analysing the effectiveness and immunogenicity of HPV-16/18 AS04-ADJUVANTED Vaccine against cervical cancer, was conducted by using two main databases: EbescoHost (Medline and Academic Search) and PubMed. Advanced searches were conducted using specific key words, various filters and Boolean operators ‘OR’ and ‘AND’ to find the most suitable literature. This process resulted in over 100 results. From this cohort, clinical trials were selected in accordance with the specific inclusion and exclusion criteria determined for the review. After duplicates from both databases were removed, the studies were assessed in order or title, population and objective relevance, and the top 10 most relevant articles to the title of the literature review, were selected for the literature review. Results: The 10 clinical trials selected all obtained a minimum of 10 out of the 11 CASP requirements indicating good study quality. All 10 studies were successful in proving the immunogenicity and safety of the HPV-16/18 AS04-adjuvant vaccine in protecting women 15+ (15-55 years) from developing HPV-induced cervical cancer [15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24]. This confers that vaccination against HPV-16/18 virus proves to be effective in preventing HPV-induced CIN and cervical cancer and is a safe to administer vaccine.