Gamechanger: Key lessons from cancer frontline

Doctors, researchers and scientists shared new findings on ways to tackle cancer at the 2025 American Society of Clinical Oncology annual meeting, the world's largest cancer conference. The event in Chicago, attended by about 44,000 health professionals, featured more than 200 sessions on this year's theme, Driving Knowledge to Action: Building a Better Future. Here is a roundup of the key studies.

- Andrew Gregory

Immunotherapy An immunotherapy drug could help some patients live years longer without the cancer getting worse or returning, a trial found. Pembrolizumab, sold under the brand name Keytruda, kept head and neck cancers at bay for five years compared with 30 months with standard care. It also slashed the risk of the disease returning in another part of the body.

A second study showed patients with a deadly form of skin cancer could live longer with an innovative one-time immunotherapy. Almost one in five people with advanced melanoma survived for five years after receiving lifileucel, with tumors shrinking in the majority of cases, the trial found.

Car T-cell therapy This is a new form of immunotherapy where a patient's own T-cells - a type of white blood cell - are tweaked in a lab to target and kill cancer cells. The designer cells are then infused back into their bloodstream to fight the disease. One trial found cancer patients on Car T-cell therapy could live 40% longer.

The therapy has already proved successful in treating blood cancers. Now results from the world's first randomized controlled trial of Car T-cell therapy in solid tumors suggest it could be transformative in the fight against these cancers too. Solid tumors represent about 90% of all cancers, including breast, lung and pancreatic cancer. In the trial hailed as a "milestone" by experts, patients with advanced gastric or gastro-oesophageal junction cancer treated with Car T-cell therapy lived on average approximately 40% longer than patients who received standard care.