Novel drugs are desperately needed in the fight against cancer. But what if we could improve survival with older, less expensive drugs—just by changing how and when they’re given? This question inspired Dr. Mary McCormack to spend more than two decades studying adjustments to chemotherapy and radiation therapies for patients with advanced cervical cancer. The idea is that shortening and eliminating gaps in treatment can improve outcomes. Scientists last tried these experiments in the 1990s, but drug companies lacked the profit motive to pursue them. So McCormack, a clinical oncologist at the University College London, did her research on a tighter budget, focusing on already available chemo drugs and compressing the chemo treatment into just six weeks—leaving cancer no time to grow back between rounds—followed immediately by chemoradiotherapy. Her small study in 2008 suggested a better survival rate compared to previous patients who’d received the standard treatment. A larger trial with 500 patients to validate the results took 10 more years. Many questioned if McCormack, hampered by a lack of resources for outreach, coordinators, and patient support outside the U.K., would ever recruit enough patients. “Please, please don’t pull the plug on this,” she remembers urging Cancer Research UK, a group funding her work in 2018. McCormack herself wondered if she could complete the study and felt like quitting but “had to see this through to the end for the patients,” she says.
In October 2024, her persistence paid off: the study finally finished, showing unprecedented benefits. Just by altering the course of treatment, the group with a revised schedule had a 40% reduction in the risk of dying and a 35% reduction in the risk of cancer recurrence over five years, compared to the standard schedule.
With the cheap drugs widely available, her protocol has been adopted by institutions around the world since the study was published. Rethinking how to use what we already had is “a big win for a small investment,” McCormack says.