Cervical cancer vaccine 'Nobel Prize-winning stuff'

BRISBANE - A cervical cancer vaccine should be available by next year following a medical breakthrough hailed as one of the biggest advances in women's health since the contraceptive pill.

Final trials of the vaccine, known as Gardasil, show it to be 100 per cent effective against the most common strains of human papilloma virus (HPV) which cause an estimated 70 per cent of cervical cancers.

Even if women are vaccinated, they will still need pap smears, but probably not as often as the recommended two years.

Between 60 to 70 New Zealand women die from cervical cancer each year - or about 2.7 people for every 100,000. The death rate has nearly halved since mass screening, which covers women aged 20 to 69, started in 1991.

The vaccine is the work of Australian scientist Ian Frazer and his University of Queensland colleagues in the early 1990s.

Scottish-bred Dr Frazer began the research 20 years ago working out of a basement at Brisbane's Princess Alexandra Hospital.

He switched his scientific focus from hepatitis to cervical cancer.

"When I came here ... in 1985, we worked in the basement of the dialysis unit and I worked in a cupboard," he joked in a recent interview.

Two decades on, his research is being described as Nobel Prize-winning stuff that will revolutionise women's health worldwide and save many millions of dollars in medical costs.

The latest study of more than 12,000 women from 13 countries found Gardasil prevented early stage cervical cancer and pre-cancerous lesions caused by the two most common forms of human papilloma virus - HPV 16 and 18.

Half the women received three doses of the vaccine and half were given a placebo, or inactive treatment.

No pre-cancerous lesions of the cervix were found in those who were given Gardasil.

However, 21 women in the control group developed lesions during the two-year study.

Gardasil is based on Dr Frazer's 1991 discovery of a way to create artificial HPV in the test tube, minus any infectious material.

The vaccine works by provoking an immune response to HPV, which is sexually transmitted.

"What we did was make the skin of the virus without the insides," he said yesterday.

"It looks like the virus to the immune system ... but it's not infectious and it can't cause any disease. It's just the shell of the virus."

- AAP