Targeting the fourth most common cancer in women globally, a new treatment regime combining chemo and chemoradiation therapy has reduced the rates of death by 40%.
Cervical cancer affects over 300,000 women worldwide, and the regime has been heralded as “remarkable”— “the biggest gain in survival since the adoption of chemoradiation in 1999.”
Those were the words of Dr. Mary McCormack, the lead investigator of the trial at University College London.
The trial of the new treatment plan was conducted over 10 years and recruited patients in Italy, Brazil, the US, India, and Mexico. It featured a short course of traditional chemotherapy before chemoradiation, the standard treatment for cervical cancer involving a combination of chemotherapy and radiotherapy.
Though it doesn’t sound like much, this small reorganization reduced rates of death from cervical cancer by 40%, and rates of the cancer returning by 35% over a five-year time horizon.
Called the Interlace trial, it was funded by Cancer Research UK and UCL Cancer Trials Centre. 500 women were given the choice between the novel treatment plan and a standard plan. They all had advanced, localized cervical cancer that hadn’t spread to other organs.
After five years, 80% of those who received chemoradiation which started with this short course of chemotherapy first were alive, and 72% of the women had neither relapsed nor seen their cancer spread.
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Cervical cancer is particularly nasty, as it typically affects women in their 30s, and has a high recurrence rate.
The novel treatment uses drugs that are both cheap and already approved for use worldwide.
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“The simple act of adding induction chemotherapy to the start of chemoradiation treatment for cervical cancer has delivered remarkable results,” said Dr. Iain Foulkes, the executive director of research and innovation at Cancer Research UK.
“A growing body of evidence is showing that additional chemotherapy before other treatments, like surgery and radiotherapy, can improve the chances of successful treatment for patients. Not only can it reduce the chances of cancer coming back, it can also be delivered quickly, using drugs already available worldwide.”
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