• Posted October 17, 2024

New Drug Regimen Extends Survival for Cervical Cancer Patients

In some good news for women battling locally advanced cervical cancer, new research shows that adding six weeks of chemotherapy to standard treatment cuts the risk of death by 40 percent.

“This is the biggest improvement in outcome in this disease in over 20 years,” lead investigator Dr. Mary McCormack, from University College London’s Cancer Institute, said in a news release from Cancer Research UK, which funded the trial. “I’m incredibly proud of all the patients who participated in the trial; their contribution has allowed us to gather the evidence needed to improve treatment of cervical cancer patients everywhere.”

The new treatment approach also cuts the risk of cervical cancer returning or relapsing by 35%, the researchers added. 

The study, published this week in the journal The Lancet, involved 500 patients from 32 medical centers in Brazil, India, Italy, Mexico and the UK who were randomly assigned into two groups between 2012 and 2022. All had locally advanced cervical cancer, though none had tumors that had spread to other organs.

The control group received only chemoradiotherapy, a standard treatment with radiation and the drug cisplatin. The experimental group received six weeks of treatment with carboplatin and paclitaxel chemotherapy before beginning chemoradiotherapy.

What did they discover?

The researchers found that 80% of those who got a short course of chemotherapy first lived at least five more years, and 72% did not have any cancer return or spread. In the control group, 72% survived at least five years, and 64% had no cancer return or spread.

“Timing is everything when you’re treating cancer,” Dr. Iain Foulkes, executive director of research and innovation at Cancer Research UK, said in the group's news release. “The simple act of adding induction chemotherapy to the start of chemoradiation treatment for cervical cancer has delivered remarkable results in this trial.”  

“A growing body of evidence is showing the value of additional rounds of chemotherapy before other treatments like surgery and radiotherapy in several other cancers,” Foulkes added. “Not only can it reduce the chances of cancer coming back, it can be delivered quickly using drugs already available worldwide.”

Still, the treatment came with side effects.

In the trial, most patients experienced some kind of adverse event, including fatigue or weakness, gastrointestinal problems, infections or low white blood cell counts. Severe or life-threatening events happened in 59% of the group that got the initial chemotherapy, compared with 48% of those who got chemoradiotherapy alone.

Cisplatin-based chemotherapy is currently the most commonly used method of treating cervical cancer, improving survival rates by 30% to 50%. While tumor removal surgery is an option, some experts prefer chemotherapy.

“We know that surgery is going to leave some of the cancer behind,” Dr. Otis Brawley, a professor of oncology at Johns Hopkins University and former chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society, told CNN. “If you can treat with radiation and chemotherapy, you have a chance that you’re going to sterilize the pelvis of all of the cancer… We have the chances that we’re going to put women into a prolonged, complete remission.”

Cervical cancer, often caused by certain strains of the human papillomavirus (HPV), was once the leading cause of cancer death for women in the United States, Brawley noted, but the development of an HPV vaccine that can help prevent cervical cancer has changed the game.

In addition, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved a new test in May where patients can collect their own vaginal samples in the comfort of their homes to test for HPV, streamlining the screening process.

“It’s almost totally preventable with either the HPV vaccine or screening,” Brawley said. “Of the 4,400 deaths from cervical cancer, none of them get screened every year.”

More information

The National Cancer Institute has more on cervical cancer.

SOURCE: The Lancet, Oct. 16, 2024; CNN