Starting date: November 2021
Work Programme
The overall goal of the Public Health Decision Science Team (PHDS) is to inform public health decision-making at a global and local level on the basis on predictive models combining high-quality empirical data and advanced algorithms. This initiative focuses on cancers related to infectious agents in both high-income countries and low- and middle-income countries; working concomitantly in both settings will accelerate knowledge and technology transfer from high-resource to low-resource settings.
PHDS is developing an open-source modelling platform, called METHIS (ModElling Tools for HPV Infection-related cancers), dedicated to modelling the natural history and control of human papillomavirus (HPV) infection and cervical cancer. The platform encompasses a range of integrated models of increasing complexity and flexibility. This approach makes it possible to adapt public health projections of the expected impact of HPV vaccination and cervical cancer screening on the occurrence of cervical cancer to context-specific needs and locally available data sets.
Concomitantly, PHDS is conducting field studies aimed at assessing the actual impact of HPV vaccination in selected countries. The collected data will then be used to inform the modelling platform and provide context-specific recommendations about cervical cancer control. These recommendations will be useful not only to the public health authorities of a specific country but also to stakeholders from countries that are less advanced in the adoption of cervical cancer control measures. To achieve its goals, PHDS collaborates with other IARC teams as well as with other organizations and funders, such as the World Health Organization (WHO), European Union (EU)-funded consortia, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF).
PHDS is also part of the HPV-FASTER-IMPLEMENT project, which is investigating the feasibility and cost–effectiveness of offering concomitant HPV vaccination and HPV-based screening to vulnerable populations, including but not limited to individuals such as migrants, people who are homeless, people who use drugs, transgender males, female sex workers, and women living with HIV. Vulnerable women, as a result of their challenges in self-care and protection, are less likely to have been vaccinated and to undergo screenings compared with the general population. In the future, limited access to HPV vaccination by vulnerable populations will aggravate the problem. Through stakeholder engagement, mathematical modelling, and implementation research, HPV-FASTER-IMPLEMENT will produce valuable evidence to inform policy recommendations and to strengthen national prevention programmes with interventions tailored to vulnerable populations.
Within the CHRONOS project, PHDS is setting up an International Coordination Center (ICC) to measure HPV prevalence and the impact of HPV vaccination in resource-limited settings. The ICC will be based at IARC and will focus on developing standardized and exportable procedures to assist local partner institutions in selected countries to plan, prepare, conduct, monitor, and analyse findings from HPV cross-sectional prevalence surveys. The ICC will train and provide support to local personnel to ensure adequate quality standards and will centralize the data to allow for its comprehensive, transparent, and standardized analyses. The output of this project will inform cervical cancer control strategies and accelerate progress towards cervical cancer elimination, while building capacity in resource-limited settings.
In the future, the experience acquired in the field of cervical cancer control will be expanded to assess the impact of population-based control measures against other cancer types related to infectious agents, such as gastric cancer.
Team Composition
Team Leader: Dr Iacopo Baussano, Early Detection, Prevention, and Infections Branch (EPR), IARC
Email: [email protected]
Team members:
Dr Indira Adhikari (Postdoctoral Scientist, EPR)
Dr Partha Basu (Branch Head, EPR)
Dr Freddie Bray (Branch Head, CSU)
Mr Maxime Bonjour (Doctoral Student, EPR)
Dr Abrham Wondimu Dagne (Postdoctoral Scientist, EPR)
Ms Philippine Gason (Project Assistant, EPR)
Mr Damien Georges (Senior Research Assistant, Data Management/Analysis, EPR)
Dr Andrea Gini (Postdoctoral Scientist, EPR)
Dr Alina Macacu (Consultant, EPR)
Dr Irene Man (Scientist, EPR)
Dr Jin Young Park (Scientist, EPR)
Dr Mary Luz Rol (Scientist, EPR)
Ms Vanessa Tenet (Senior Research Assistant, Data Management/Analysis, EPR)
Dr Rachel Wittenauer (Postdoctoral Scientist, EPR)
Former team members:
Mr Andrei Cividjian (Master’s Student, EPR)
Mr Mattis Eynard (Master’s Student, EPR)
Dr Ahmad Fuady (Postdoctoral Scientist, EPR)
Key networks: Risk-Based Screening for Cervical Cancer (RISCC) Consortium, HPV Board, Coalition to Strengthen the HPV Immunization Community (CHIC) Council, HPV-FASTER-IMPLEMENT EU Consortium
Key funding: Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), World Health Organization (WHO), European Commission
Key publications
- Arroyo Mühr LS, Gini A, Yilmaz E, Hassan SS, Lagheden C, Hultin E, et al. (2024). Concomitant human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination and screening for elimination of HPV and cervical cancer. Nat Commun. 15(1):3679. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-47909-x PMID:38693149
- Clifford GM, Baussano I, Heideman DAM, Tshering S, Choden T, Lazzarato F, et al. (2023). Human papillomavirus testing on self-collected samples to detect high-grade cervical lesions in rural Bhutan: the REACH-Bhutan study. Cancer Med. 12(10):11828–37. https://doi.org/10.1002/cam4.5851 PMID:36999740
- de Carvalho TM, Man I, Georges D, Saraswati LR, Bhandari P, Kataria I, et al. (2023). Health and economic effects of introducing single-dose or two-dose human papillomavirus vaccination in India. BMJ Glob Health. 8(11):e012580. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjgh-2023-012580 PMID:37931940
- Fuady A, Setiawan D, Man I, de Kok IMCM, Baussano I (2024). Toward a framework to assess the financial and economic burden of cervical cancer in low- and middle-income countries: a systematic review. JCO Glob Oncol. 10(10):e2400066. https://doi.org/10.1200/GO.24.00066 PMID:39116362
- Lehtinen M, Bruni L, Elfström M, Gray P, Logel M, Mariz FC, et al. (2024). Scientific approaches toward improving cervical cancer elimination strategies. Int J Cancer. 154(9):1537–48. https://doi.org/10.1002/ijc.34839 PMID:38196123
- Man I, Georges D, Basu P, Baussano I (2024). Leveraging single-dose human papillomavirus vaccination dose-efficiency to attain cervical cancer elimination in resource-constrained settings. J Natl Cancer Inst Monogr. 2024(67):400–9. https://doi.org/10.1093/jncimonographs/lgae035 PMID:39529528
- Man I, Georges D, Bonjour M, Baussano I (2023). Approximating missing epidemiological data for cervical cancer through Footprinting: a case study in India. Elife. 12:e81752. https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.81752 PMID:37227260
- Man I, Georges D, Sankaranarayanan R, Basu P, Baussano I (2023). Building resilient cervical cancer prevention through gender-neutral HPV vaccination. Elife. 12:e85735. https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.85735 PMID:37486822
- Sayinzoga F, Tenet V, Heideman DAM, Sibomana H, Umulisa MC, Franceschi S, et al. (2023). Human papillomavirus vaccine effect against human papillomavirus infection in Rwanda: evidence from repeated cross-sectional cervical-cell-based surveys. Lancet Glob Health. 11(7):e1096–104. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2214-109X(23)00193-6 PMID:37207683
- Wei F, Georges D, Man I, Baussano I, Clifford GM (2024). Causal attribution of human papillomavirus genotypes to invasive cervical cancer worldwide: a systematic analysis of the global literature. Lancet. 404(10451):435–44. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(24)01097-3 PMID:39097395