A new cervical cancer treatment that has been trialled over the past ten years has been shown to reduce the risk of dying by 40%. This has been the biggest advance in fighting the disease in 25 years. Cervical cancer is the fourth most common cancer in women and over 300,000 females develop the disease globally.
Cervical cancer treatment trials involved patients worldwide
The trial patients recruited lived in Italy, Brazil, the US, India, and Mexico. The treatment consisted of a short course of chemotherapy before patients undergo chemoradiation, the standard treatment for cervical cancer involving a combination of chemotherapy and radiotherapy. The trial, known as the Interlace trial, was funded by Cancer Research UK and the Cancer Trials Centre at the University College of London (UCL). The study looked at whether a short course of induction chemotherapy before chemoradiation could cut relapses and deaths among patients with cervical cancer that had not spread to other organs in the body.
Findings after Cervical Cancer Interlace Trial
After five years, 80% of those who received chemoradiation after a short course of chemotherapy first, were alive, and 72% of the women had not relapsed and their cancer had not spread. “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. Dr Mary McCormack, the lead investigator of the trial at UCL, stated it is “the biggest gain in survival since the adoption of chemoradiation in 1999.”
