Paul Eder, a senior director with Qiagen in Gaithersburg, has spent the past five years working on an HPV test for women who live in the developing world. HPV, the human papilloma virus, is the primary cause of cervical cancer. The CareHPV project, which received funding by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and is conducted in partnership with the global nonprofit health care organization PATH, will run pilot programs in Nicaragua, India and Uganda in 2009.
How do you find people capable of administering these tests in rural, developing parts of the world?
The tests were made simple enough to be run by local residents with, say, only a high school education. We proved that by working with a farmer’s daughter in China who ran a valid test every time during the three weeks we were there to do training.
How did you ensure you’d be able to follow up with women who tested positive? If they live in rural areas, could it be hard to track them down?
We proved we could recruit them, test them and follow up in the same day, so we didn’t have to worry about them coming back later. We needed a test that could all be done in the same day, because life there is very different from how things are done here where people are used to calling their doctors or getting a postcard in the mail to follow up on test results.
How can these highly sophisticated tests be conducted in areas with little to no infrastructure?
We had to understand the environments into which these are going. The space the test occupies is about the size of three sheets of paper, it does not require electricity, it does not require clean running water. We make the chemical agents used in the test very robust to deal with these sorts of environments.
Have you heard inspiring stories about how these tests can change lives?
Where we’ve gone already in China, we’ve worked with women who have never had a health screening or physical exam at any point in there lives. To be able to bring these tests to them was pretty inspiring.
