- December 11, 2025
- By Jason P. Dinh
Cervical cancer is the fourth-most common cancer for women in the world, with more than 660,000 new cases and nearly 350,000 deaths per year. Now, University of Maryland mathematicians have developed effective strategies to help contain and potentially eliminate the disease.
The research, published last week in the journal Bulletin of Mathematical Biology, offers a new mathematical model that can help public health officials design effective vaccination and cancer screening policies.
“The study provides a clear way of showing how science is influencing policy,” said senior author Abba Gumel, a Distinguished University Professor of mathematics at UMD who holds joint appointments in the Institute for Health Computing and the Institute for Physical Science and Technology.
Nearly all cervical cancer cases are caused by human papillomavirus (HPV), which is considered the most common sexually transmitted infection in the world. HPV, a vaccine-preventable disease, is often asymptomatic and resolves naturally within two years in 90% of cases, but persistent infection in the remainder can lead to cancer.
HPV vaccines, which are offered and recommended in 147 countries, can minimize disease spread and cancer risk. As part of the National Science Foundation-supported research, the UMD team developed a new mathematical model to assess the efficacy of various vaccination strategies over time, which it tested with a case study on South Korea.
“Cervical cancer is one of the few cancers effectively prevented by vaccines,” said study lead author Soyoung Park, a Ph.D. candidate in applied mathematics and statistics, and scientific computation at UMD. “It was important to check if the recent government program for offering vaccines is going to be enough to effectively control the disease in Korea.”
Abba Gumel (Photo by John T. Consoli)
The model presented in the study (which included Ph.D. candidate Hyunah Lim as a third co-author) incorporates previously published demographic and epidemiological data to predict how HPV transmits across a population. It stratifies people by sex, vaccination status, HPV infection and cancer progression, and it was calibrated using South Korean cancer data from 1999 to 2020.
Simulations of the model revealed that current South Korean policies show only partial success. South Korea’s National Immunization Program (NIP), which started in 2016, vaccinates roughly 80% of the nation’s girls aged 12-17. Another 30,000 women aged 18-26 receive “catch-up vaccinations” annually. Additionally, the National Cancer Screening Program provides regular Pap tests to detect cancerous lesions for roughly 61% of Korean women older than 20.
“It’s achieving the objective of reducing cases of cervical cancer, but it’s not going to eliminate it,” said Gumel, who has collaborated with the modeling team of Merck, the company that originally developed the HPV vaccine. “The objective is elimination.”
South Korea could eliminate HPV by expanding vaccine access, the researchers found. The authors explored two scenarios where the NIP could be improved. The first involved expanding vaccine access to cover 99% of females. Additionally, because the authors found that immunizing boys has a strong spillover effect of protecting females, the second scenario involved maintaining the current 80% female vaccination coverage while vaccinating 65% of boys aged 12-17. Model simulations suggest that these efforts would eliminate HPV-related cancers in South Korea within 60 and 70 years, respectively.
Both vaccination strategies for expanded coverage are feasible in Korea given that national coverage for infant immunizations, such as measles, under NIP approaches 98%, Park said. She added that public buy-in for vaccination campaigns is high in South Korea. “Vaccinating boys reduces the pressure of having to vaccinate a large proportion of females,” said Gumel, who also holds the Michael and Eugenia Brin Endowed E-Nnovate Chair in Mathematics. “It makes elimination more realistically achievable.”
The two solutions the researchers propose would achieve herd immunity, meaning that people who cannot be vaccinated—for example, the elderly or those allergic to the vaccine—would be protected against HPV and related cancers.
The authors showed that while expanding Pap test coverage may only offer marginal benefits, strategies that promote safer sex practices, like condom use, would be very effective in curtailing the burden of HPV and related cancers in communities.
Now, Park is tweaking the model to explicitly account for the contact dynamics of men who have sex with men, as well as other high-risk groups, such as female sex workers.
At a conference talk last year in South Korea, Park connected with researchers who work closely with Korean public health agencies. They showed strong interest in sharing data and potentially using the study to improve NIP. She added that the findings are applicable around the world—including in the U.S.
“Can we do the same thing?” Park said. “Will the same set of intervention strategies work effectively here?”
Gumel sees reason to try. He reckons that with the 95% effective Gardisil-9 vaccine offered in the U.S., around 70% coverage would be sufficient to achieve herd immunity.
“We do not have to be losing 350,000 people globally to cervical cancer each year,” he said. “We can see an end to HPV and HPV-related cancers if we improve the vaccination coverage.”
Soyoung Park