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.
• A new drug which strips the cancer tumor’s “invisibility cloak” to allow an immunotherapy drug, cemiplimab. to attack and kill the cancer cells. Cancerous tumors utilize a variety of techniques, including the use of proteins and sugars, to “hide” from the body’s immune system. The new experimental drug—taken in pill form and called GRWD5769— can help the body’s own immune system to shrink tumors by at least 30% in six of the world’s most common forms of the disease (cervical, bladder, liver, bowel, lung, and head/neck cancers).
• Millions of women diagnosed with breast cancer could skip chemotherapy and rely instead on hormone therapy.
“The Optima trial, led by University College London, followed 4,000 patients with newly diagnosed breast cancer in the UK, Norway, Sweden, Australia, New Zealand and Thailand. Those with a low score on the genomic test could be treated safely with hormone therapy alone, it found.”
Many other presentations portrayed an optimistic view, in spite of cancer cases rising (due to many factors, including increased longevity), noting that deaths from cancer have fallen by a third in the last 25 years, and that medical research can pave the way for even greater breakthroughs.
