Baroness Margaret McDonagh

Baroness McDonagh, a former General Secretary of the Labour Party, died on 24 June 2023. Her sister, Siobhain McDonagh, is the Member of Parliament for Mitcham and Morden.

No barrier was too high for my sister, Margaret McDonagh. She was strong, formidable, relentless and determined. No task would she allow to defeat her. The greater the challenge, the greater her gusto. Success for her was important, but the limelight wasn’t.

Margaret worked to promote others and cared zilch for self glory. She was like this in politics and business and life.

When Margaret was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumour there was never any doubt that she would see this as a challenge. She allowed no time for self pity, she needed to understand all there was to know about glioblastoma in order to take it on.

Together we did the research and what we discovered appalled us. The treatment available on the NHS is woefully inadequate. All the money is being directed elsewhere. Doctors are being trained in other cancers but this one is being left on the way side. Clinical trials are non-existent. The usual surgery and radiotherapy are available, but chemotherapy is being carried out with a drug stuck in a time warp. First trialled in the 70s and in use since 2005, the drug has not advanced since.

Margaret was too unwell to withstand the chemo but we sought private care from Dr Paul Mulholland who put her on a regime of immunotherapies and hyperthermic treatments. The machine for the hyperthermic treatment was in Germany. Sometimes she could barely get on the plane. German hotel rooms became a place of sickness and gloom, full of loneliness and despair.

On better days we would campaign and raise funds for the UK to buy the necessary equipment. Margaret had a new fight to win. I’m proud to say that, because of her efforts, Dr Mulholland now has that machine.

But one brilliant doctor cannot take the weight of a nation on his shoulders. 

I stood up in the House of Commons in March 2023 and asked for action. Brain cancer should not be the forgotten cancer.

Every young doctor, training to be a medical oncologist, needs to go through a compulsory course on brain cancer.

The pharmaceutical industry needs to step up. Every drug licensed to deal with tumours needs to be utilised by testing for effectiveness on glioblastoma.

We need full clinical trials to find out what works and what doesn’t. 200 sufferers need to be recruited annually.

More than 3,000 people are diagnosed with glioblastoma every year.  On behalf of Margaret, I would ask that the NHS lets those men and women have some of the limelight.

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About Glioblastoma

Glioblastoma is a type of aggressive brain cancer that over 3,200 people in the UK are diagnosed with every year.

In most cases, the underlying cause is unknown, and they usually occur sporadically in people with no family history of tumours.

There is no cure for glioblastoma, and the median overall survival rate is under one year.

The current treatment – surgery followed by a combination of radiotherapy and chemotherapy – results in a modest improvement in survival rates of up to around 15 months. Due to this lack of effective treatment options, glioblastoma is recognised as a cancer of substantial unmet need.

At UCL, Dr Paul Mulholland, medical oncologist and leader of the Glioblastoma Research Group, is leading a programme to significantly improve outcomes by administering immunotherapies to glioblastoma patients. They believe a cure for glioblastoma is possible.

Immunotherapy has revolutionised the treatment of several advanced cancers, and the group are using an integrated translational research programme which will provide invaluable insights into the immunology of glioblastoma, laying the foundation for the design of ever improving combinatorial therapies.

As always, philanthropy is the ingredient that drives research and translation further and faster.

In this case, it will directly support Dr Mulholland and his team to identify better treatments for this aggressive form of cancer, making a real impact on the lives of people affected in future.

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