Cancer summit Key lessons from frontline of research

Doctors and scientists shared new research about ways to tackle cancer at the 2026 American Society of Clinical Oncology (Asco) annual meeting, the world’s largest cancer conference.

- Andrew Gregory

The event in Chicago, attended by 40,000 health professionals, featured more than 200 sessions and 2,700 poster presentations on this year’s theme, “the science and practice of translation: improving cancer outcomes worldwide”. Here are the five biggest takeaways.

Immunotherapy drugs, which harness the body’s immune system to attack tumours, have revolutionised cancer treatment. But they don’t work in every patient and their effectiveness can falter or fail when cancer cells hide. Now researchers have developed a smart drug that stops cancer cells hiding. The experimental tablet, GRWD5769, can help shrink tumours by at least 30% in six of the world’s most common forms of the disease, delegates were told.

For the patients in a trial, who had previously failed to respond to treatment, the smart drug was able to remove “invisibility cloaks” from tumour cells. This enabled an immunotherapy drug, cemiplimab, to detect and then destroy the cancer.

Researchers led by the Christie NHS foundation trust in Manchester, found tumours shrank in 26 of 83 patients with cervical, bladder, liver, bowel, lung or head and neck cancers who were given GRWD5769 alongside cemiplimab. Of the 26, 15 had tumour reductions of at least 30%.

The trial’s principal investigator, Prof Fiona Thistlethwaite, said: “For a drug that is given as a tablet, this is very impressive. We need further studies, but this is a new drug with a new mechanism that clearly helps immunotherapy perform more effectively.”

A second trial presented at the conference showed that combining another smart drug with chemotherapy helped people with lung cancer live 15% longer on average. Like GRWD5769, ivonescimab blocks the “off” switch used by tumours to evade the immune system, exposing cancer cells and allowing the body to recognise and fight the disease.