About Elevate
The ELEVATE consortium wants to empower women to screen for their cervical cancer risk in any setting while guaranteeing rapid and easy-to-understand results. To that end, the project will identify hard-to-reach women and design a screening strategy to access them. This strategy includes the development of a user-friendly, low-cost, portable self-sampling screening tool which will be able to detect 14 high-risk human papillomavirus (HPV) types and 2 proteomic cervical cancer biomarkers.
The simultaneous detection of HPV DNA with the proteomic marker will allow for more accurate detection of HPV infections associated with cervical cancer progression. Therefore more relevant patients can be detected and treated, thereby drastically reducing the cancer burden in these populations. An intervention during which the self-testing device will be piloted in hard-to-reach communities in Belgium, Portugal, Ecuador and Brazil will provide information about the acceptability and cost-effectiveness of the tool.
Our motivation for this project
Five key challenges regarding cervical cancer screening have shaped the ELEVATE project
- Lack of evidence about who the hard-to-reach women are and how they can be reached;
- Current cervical cancer screening tools are not available, acceptable, and/or cost-effective for hard-to-reach women, resulting in under-screening;
- Use of HPV DNA tests as screening strategies is limited by their low specificity to detect transforming infections with high risk to drive pre-cancer and cancer;
- Current HPV DNA tests lack concordance, which means they may miss high-risk HPV infections, particularly in women with different ethno-geographic origins;
- Lack of alternatives for HPV testing applicable to low-income settings or point-of-care testing.