Who Should I Vaccinate? Let Me Look Into My CART

• Activity Number: 513
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Wednesday, August 4, 2010 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: Biopharmaceutical Section
• Author(s): Oliver Bautista*+
• Companies: Merck & Co., Inc.
• Keywords: CART ; tree-based methods ; prophylactic vaccination

Abstract

GARDASIL is a prophylactic vaccine that is efficacious in preventing cervical and external genital disease related to the vaccine-HPV types (6,11,16,18) among young women who are naïve to the vaccine-HPV types. The older women population who have longer life-time exposure to HPV is expected to have a larger proportion of vaccine-HPV type non-naïve women for whom the vaccine will not be as efficacious compared to younger women. A cost-free method for predicting if an older woman is highly likely to be vaccine-HPV type naïve that excludes a polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test, the definitive method of detecting HPV infection, is a desirable tool for identifying older women likely to benefit from vaccination with GARDASIL. Results of investigations to identify such a method using classification and regression trees (CART) are presented.