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Witness History: Fighting cancer

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Vincent-Devita-and-colleagu.jpg

23/12/2019 GMT

Fighting cancer

BBC World Service - Witness History, Fighting cancer

Pioneering work in the 60s into combination chemotherapy to try to find a cure for cancer

In the 1960s, doctors in the US developed a radical new approach to treating cancer, using several toxic chemicals at once, and revolutionising survival rates.

In the 1960s doctors began ground-breaking work into using several toxic chemicals at once to treat cancer. Combination chemotherapy, as it was called, would revolutionise cancer survival rates, particularly for Hodgkin Lymphoma, until then a virtual death sentence. Louise Hidalgo has been talking to the doctor who played a key part in that breakthrough, clinical oncologist, Vincent DeVita who has spent his more than 50-year career trying to cure cancer.

Picture: Vincent DeVita (centre) and colleagues George Canellos and Bob Young circa 1971 (Credit: Joel Carl Freid)

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