key papers

The 2026 journal summary of the US NCCN breast cancer guideline, this version focused on recurrent and metastatic disease and how treatment is chosen by receptor status, prior therapy and time since treatment.

The trial of 644 women with newly metastatic triple-negative breast cancer who could not have immunotherapy, in which the antibody-drug conjugate datopotamab deruxtecan held the cancer still for 10.8 months against 5.6 with chemotherapy and lengthened life from 18.7 to 23.7 months.

In the largest trial ever run in lymphoma of the brain, a stem cell transplant after MATRix chemotherapy kept 78 percent of patients free of progression at three years against 51 percent with conventional consolidation chemotherapy, and lengthened survival.

In children and adults whose severe weight gain followed damage to the hypothalamus, a year of daily setmelanotide injections cut body-mass index by 16.5 percent while placebo recipients gained 3.3 percent, and hunger fell more too.

The six-year OlympiA update: the year of olaparib still cut relapse by 35 percent and death by 28 percent, six-year survival was 87.5 versus 83.2 percent, there were fewer new BRCA-related breast and ovarian cancers, and no excess of leukaemia.

In AMPLIFY, an all-oral, 14-month course of acalabrutinib plus venetoclax beat FCR or BR chemo-immunotherapy in fit CLL patients, offering a time-limited alternative to indefinite pills.

Giving daratumumab for up to three years to people with high-risk smouldering myeloma roughly halved the risk of progressing to active myeloma or death compared with watching and waiting.

The oral HER2-selective kinase inhibitor zongertinib shrank tumours in about seven in ten patients with previously treated HER2-mutant lung cancer with little of the diarrhoea and rash that plagued earlier HER2 pills, becoming the first oral drug approved for this driver.

The 2025 summary of the US NCCN guideline for gallbladder and bile duct cancers, focused on what to give after surgery.

Adding a BRAF inhibitor and an EGFR antibody to first-line chemotherapy roughly doubled survival in BRAF V600E-mutated metastatic bowel cancer, one of the worst-prognosis subtypes.

A year of cemiplimab after surgery and radiotherapy for high-risk cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma cut the risk of recurrence or death by more than two thirds, the first adjuvant therapy to work in this skin cancer.

Cabozantinib delayed progression in previously treated advanced neuroendocrine tumours of both pancreatic and extra-pancreatic origin compared with placebo, adding a new option after somatostatin analogues, everolimus or radioligand therapy.

In patients who were transplant-ineligible or deferred transplant, the daratumumab quadruplet raised deep-remission rates from about 39% to 61% and cut progression risk by 43%.

In CHALLENGE, three years of supervised, goal-based exercise after adjuvant chemotherapy for colon cancer reduced recurrence or death by 28% and deaths by 37%, the first randomised proof that exercise itself improves cancer survival.

Ten-year follow-up of the trial that established combination checkpoint blockade shows median survival over six years with nivolumab plus ipilimumab and a plateau in the survival curve consistent with cure.

Ten years after starting treatment, about half of patients with advanced melanoma treated with nivolumab plus ipilimumab were still alive, most without any further treatment, showing that immunotherapy can cure a disease that once killed most patients within a year.

Dual immunotherapy with nivolumab and ipilimumab delayed progression more than nivolumab alone across all lines of treatment in microsatellite-unstable colorectal cancer, with about seven in ten patients progression-free at three years.

Two courses of blinatumomab added to standard chemotherapy cut relapses in children with average- or higher-risk standard-risk leukaemia, raising three-year disease-free survival from 88% to 96%.

The first randomised trial of CAR-T cells in a solid tumour: in heavily pretreated Claudin 18.2-positive stomach cancer, satri-cel held the disease for a median of 3.25 months against 1.77 months on the doctor's choice of drug, with almost universal cytokine release syndrome.

In more than 27,000 average-risk adults who then had a colonoscopy, Freenome's blood test picked up 79 percent of bowel cancers with few false alarms, but found only one in eight advanced precancerous polyps.

Adding durvalumab and bevacizumab to chemoembolisation lengthened the time to progression by about seven months in liver cancer suitable for embolisation, the first systemic combination to improve on chemoembolisation alone.

Zenocutuzumab, an antibody that grips HER2 and HER3 at once so the NRG1 growth signal cannot get through, shrank tumours in about three in ten patients whose cancers carried an NRG1 fusion, with responses lasting close to a year, and did best in pancreatic cancer. It became the first drug approved for a pancreatic cancer driver alteration.

Patients whose blood turned positive for tumour DNA after cystectomy lived longer with atezolizumab than placebo; patients who stayed ctDNA-negative did well without any treatment. It is the first ctDNA-guided adjuvant trial to improve survival.

Giving pembrolizumab before surgery and continuing it afterwards alongside radiotherapy reduced recurrences in resectable locally advanced head and neck cancer, the first improvement in surgical treatment of the disease in two decades.

Adding lenvatinib and pembrolizumab to chemoembolisation delayed progression in intermediate-stage liver cancer, the second trial to show that systemic therapy improves on embolisation alone, at the cost of more side effects.

Adding durvalumab to perioperative FLOT chemotherapy for operable stomach cancer reduced recurrences and doubled the rate of complete pathological response, the first immunotherapy to improve outcomes in curable gastric cancer.

Adding the PD-1 antibody retifanlimab to first-line carboplatin and paclitaxel for advanced anal cancer lengthened the time before the cancer progressed from 7.4 to 9.3 months and cut the risk of progression by 37 percent, with manageable extra toxicity.

The combination of the RAF/MEK clamp avutometinib and the FAK inhibitor defactinib shrank tumours in about a third of women with recurrent low-grade serous ovarian cancer and in 44 percent of those with KRAS mutations, leading to the first approval specific to this disease.

Adding relacorilant, a drug that blocks the cortisol receptor and thereby restores chemotherapy sensitivity, to nab-paclitaxel lengthened progression-free and overall survival in platinum-resistant ovarian cancer regardless of any biomarker.

A small pretzel-shaped device that slowly releases gemcitabine inside the bladder cleared carcinoma in situ in about four out of five patients whose cancer had stopped responding to BCG, offering an alternative to bladder removal.

The 2025 international consensus on early breast cancer, which recommends platinum chemotherapy and immunotherapy for triple-negative disease, updated genetic testing guidance and shorter radiotherapy schedules.

The trial report behind India's first CAR-T therapy: about three in four heavily pretreated patients with lymphoma or leukaemia responded to cells engineered and made in Mumbai.

A 2025 letter recording the latest changes to Europe's continuously updated guideline for metastatic breast cancer, the mechanism through which first-line antibody-drug conjugate results enter European practice.

For small-cell lung cancer confined to the chest, adding two years of durvalumab after chemoradiotherapy extended median survival from under three years to over four and a half, the first advance in this setting in decades.

Adding the PD-1 antibody sintilimab to chemotherapy and radiotherapy for advanced, non-metastatic nasopharyngeal cancer raised three-year event-free survival from 76 to 86 percent, with more but manageable side effects.

In the first large randomised trial in cancer of unknown primary, choosing a targeted drug or immunotherapy from the tumour's genomic profile after three cycles of chemotherapy held the disease back for longer than simply continuing chemotherapy.

Given as the first chemotherapy-type treatment after hormone therapy stopped working, trastuzumab deruxtecan delayed progression by about five months compared with standard chemotherapy, including in tumours with barely detectable HER2.

Across seven tumour types including endometrial, cervical and ovarian cancers, trastuzumab deruxtecan shrank tumours in about 37 percent of patients overall and 61 percent of those with the highest HER2 expression, leading to a tumour-agnostic approval.

Adding durvalumab to first-line chemotherapy delayed progression in advanced endometrial cancer, and adding the PARP inhibitor olaparib to durvalumab maintenance helped further in mismatch repair-proficient tumours.

The European oncology society's 2024 guideline for breast cancer that has not spread, covering diagnosis, surgery, radiotherapy, drug treatment before and after surgery, and follow-up; the reference standard for European and UK care of early triple-negative disease.

Giving the bispecific blinatumomab to adults whose leukaemia was already undetectable after chemotherapy raised three-year survival from 68% to 85%.

Combining the Nectin-4 antibody-drug conjugate enfortumab vedotin with pembrolizumab nearly doubled survival compared with platinum chemotherapy in advanced urothelial cancer, the biggest advance in this disease in 40 years.

In the first randomised trial in these rare tumours, sunitinib kept 36 percent of patients free of progression at one year against 19 percent on placebo.

The first randomised trial ever completed in metastatic pheochromocytoma and paraganglioma found that the kinase inhibitor sunitinib roughly doubled the proportion of patients whose disease had not progressed at one year compared with placebo.

The 2024 American guideline says every woman diagnosed with breast cancer at 65 or under should be offered BRCA1/2 testing, as should anyone who might be treated with a PARP inhibitor, whatever her family history.

A new regimen built around brentuximab vedotin cured more patients with advanced Hodgkin lymphoma than the intensive BEACOPP standard, and did so with less toxicity, including less damage to fertility.

Patients with primary mediastinal B-cell lymphoma whose PET scan was negative after immunochemotherapy did just as well without consolidation radiotherapy as with it, so radiotherapy can safely be omitted for them.

In IMerge, imetelstat, the first telomerase inhibitor to reach approval, freed about 40% of heavily transfused MDS patients from transfusions for eight weeks and 28% for six months, versus 15% and 3% with placebo.

The tissue factor-directed antibody-drug conjugate tisotumab vedotin lengthened survival compared with chemotherapy in cervical cancer that had progressed after first-line treatment, at the cost of eye and nerve side effects.

Six weekly cycles of carboplatin and paclitaxel given immediately before standard chemoradiation improved survival in locally advanced cervical cancer by about eight percentage points at five years, using cheap widely available drugs.

The first international guideline on who should be screened for anal cancer and how, written after the ANCHOR trial showed that treating precancer prevents the disease.

The 2024 update to the international pancreatic cyst guidelines, which adds faster cyst growth, new diabetes and pancreatitis to the warning signs, allows surveillance to stop in some older patients with small stable cysts, and grades each recommendation by the strength of the evidence.

In people with the inherited condition NF2 whose nerve and brain-lining tumours were growing despite earlier treatment, the kinase inhibitor brigatinib shrank some tumours, slowed the growth of all types and improved hearing in a third of affected ears without serious toxicity.

The second report from KEYNOTE-A18 showed that adding pembrolizumab to chemoradiotherapy for high-risk locally advanced cervical cancer also lengthened life: 82.6% of women were alive at three years against 74.8%, a third fewer deaths.

Adding pembrolizumab to standard chemoradiotherapy for high-risk locally advanced cervical cancer reduced progression or death by 30%, the first systemic advance in this setting since cisplatin was added to radiotherapy in 1999.

Combining an EGFR-MET bispecific antibody with a third-generation EGFR pill beat osimertinib alone, delaying progression by about seven months and later improving survival, at the cost of more side effects.

Adding lung-sparing radical surgery to chemotherapy for pleural mesothelioma did not lengthen life; patients who had surgery lived slightly less long, had more complications and worse quality of life, so routine surgery is no longer recommended.

Two years of the FLT3 blocker gilteritinib after a stem-cell transplant did not significantly reduce relapses across all patients, but it clearly did in the half whose highly sensitive blood tests still found traces of the leukaemia, one of the first results to support choosing post-transplant treatment by residual disease.

Giving just two cycles of combination immunotherapy before removing melanoma lymph nodes cut relapses by more than two-thirds compared with a year of standard immunotherapy after surgery, and most patients needed no further treatment.

Three years of the CDK4/6 inhibitor ribociclib added to hormone therapy reduced relapses in stage II-III hormone-receptor-positive breast cancer, including some node-negative patients.