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Obituaries

Ken Bagshawe: physician, scientist, and innovator in medical oncology

BMJ 2023; 380 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.p365 (Published 21 February 2023) Cite this as: BMJ 2023;380:p365
  1. Michael J Seckl,
  2. Richard Begent,
  3. Surinder Sharma

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Ken Bagshawe was a senior registrar in cardiology at St Mary’s in the mid-1950s when two unusual cases of pulmonary hypertension caused him to change his specialty to medical oncology. The first, a young woman who died from unexplained pulmonary hypertension, was found at post mortem to have choriocarcinoma growing in the pulmonary artery. That was a previously undescribed complication of this gestational trophoblastic tumour, which produces human chorionic gonadotrophin (hCG). When another patient presented with a similar condition in 1957, a bioassay in rabbits gave a positive result for hCG and the diagnosis was made. He treated the patient with 6-mercaptopurine, which had just become available and was producing some remissions in leukaemia. Three days later the patient was out of her oxygen tent and went on to live a long and healthy life.

Medical oncology

At that time choriocarcinoma, even without pulmonary hypertension, was almost invariably fatal …

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