Right now POI is energized and charged with a new mission: do everything in our power to support our colleagues and help facilitate the completion of their work on PAVE which is expected to require 2.5 years.
PAVE is a novel strategy for cervical cancer screening and prevention targeting low-income and hard to reach populations. It integrates self-collection for the human papillomavirus and A.I. assisted visual evaluation to provide a risk of having high grade cervical pre-cancer or cancer. PAVE’s current accomplishments include bringing together personnel from 4 continents (9 countries plus the USA) to achieve the goal of preventing cervical cancer globally. The personnel include epidemiologists, physicians, statisticians, public health specialists, laboratory scientists, AI specialists, and engineers focused on working together to address the fact that 600,000 women develop cervical cancer every year, and 300,000 die from the disease. The women who are most at risk are those who were born before the HPV vaccine was available, were unable to get the vaccine prior to infection, or have no access to the vaccine. Over the past 7 years using the latest developments in Human Papillomavirus technologies (in part developed by PAVE) and AI assisted visual examination (refined by PAVE), a novel low cost highly accurate screening strategy has been developed for resource-limited settings. Now with the finish line in site, the NIH funding has been eliminated as of June 2025. To complete the work the algorithm needs to be validated against current models and their cost-effectiveness demonstrated so world-wide acceptance and implementation can occur.
POI is planning to continue its work and to support other researchers with the intent to prevent cervical cancer globally. We are currently raising funds to complete the next phase of the PAVE project and expand the project to national and international sites that POI has worked in over the past two decades. About PAVE