This article is from the WebMD Feature Archive

From year to year, you can count on medical science for a few golden nuggets of good news in contrast to all the reports of disaster and impending doom. Among the happiest headlines of 2002 were those announcing that a vaccine protects against the virus that causes cervical cancer. Could this be the first in a long line of cancer vaccines?

In a study that appeared in the Nov. 21 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine, nearly 1,200 women received a vaccine against a type of human papillomavirus (HPV) that causes up to 50% of cervical cancers. The same number of women received a placebo vaccine.

More than 40 women who got the placebo were infected with HPV over the following 17 months, but no infections were seen in the women that received the HPV vaccine.

But it's highly doubtful that this vaccine would ever be made available to the public because it protects against only one type of HPV. Overall, all types of HPV account for 95% of cases of cervical cancer. Any vaccine used to inoculate the public would have to protect against all types. But this study, sponsored by drugmaker Merck & Co., showed that this type of vaccine can actually prevent cervical cancer. Merck has other vaccines in the pipeline.

Study researcher Laura Koutsky, MD says, "This has been a major effort, and there have been several players."

One of the other players is Louisa Villa, MD, of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research in Sao Paulo, Brazil. She sits alongside Koutsky on Merck's steering committee for HPV vaccine development. In early October, Villa announced the results of a phase II clinical trial on a Merck HPV vaccine, which may actually be marketed if all goes well in the final phase of clinical testing.

These results got much less attention in the popular press than Koutsky's did -- perhaps because they were reported at an obscure conference in Paris, not in a leading American medical journal.

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