The American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) held its annual meeting for 2026 in Chicago, Illinois May 29 - June 2. It was attended by over 40,000 professionals (45% of them from outside the United States), with over 200 sessions, and its featured theme was, “The Science and Practice of Translation: Improving Cancer Outcomes Worldwide.” A central emphasis was on the need to translate scientific breakthroughs into available practice in “resource-limited countries” around the world, and “resource-limited counties” in the U.S. itself. The challenge, the keynote address stressed, is “how to make treatment available to every patient, every cancer, everywhere.”
Key presentations, as reported by The Guardian and other observers, included:
• A daily pill which can double the survival time for pancreatic cancer patients. Pancreatic cancer is the third largest cause of cancer deaths in the United States, and there had been no meaningful advances in its treatment in almost 20 years – it was widely considered “undruggable.” Yet “in a trial of 500 patients, all of whom had pancreatic cancer that had spread, the pill, daraxonrasib, doubled survival time, with fewer side-effects compared with chemotherapy…. ‘These results are landscape-changing,’ said Dr. Rachna Shroff, the Chief of Oncology at the University of Arizona Cancer Center and an ASCO expert in gastrointestinal cancers, who was not involved with the study. ‘We are seeing unprecedented survival,’” [reported](xxx) The Guardian. “When Shroff first read the results of the trial, which was led by the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, she wept, she said.”
When Dr. Brian Wolpin of Dana-Farber presented the findings to the 10,000 oncologists who had packed into the main hall to hear the results, he received a highly-unusual standing ovation, and cheers. The boisterous optimism coming from these front-line scientists in the war to defeat cancer was electric, and contagious.
