oncology
23 stories tagged "oncology"
MD Anderson Made the Case for Radiation Cleanup After Immunotherapy. Then Its Own Trial Undercut It.
In the oligometastatic subgroup the strategy was built for, small and underpowered, the patients who added radiation trended the wrong way: median survival of 42 months against 75.8 for the drugs alone.
CancerUCLA Can Grow Thousands of Cancer-Fighting Cell Doses in Six Weeks. Every Patient So Far Has Been a Mouse.
The lab put a $5,000-a-dose price on an off-the-shelf cancer therapy grown from cord blood that controlled tumors in mice with ovarian cancer and melanoma. No human has received it.
CancerSummit's $500 Million Lung Drug Split the Curve Patients Can't Feel
Ivonescimab delayed tumor progression by 2.4 months in EGFR-mutated lung cancer, but its overall-survival curve never cleared statistical significance and serious treatment-related adverse events nearly doubled.
Drugs & FDAThe FDA Approved a Breast Cancer Drug Four Months After Its Advisers Voted No
On April 30 the FDA's oncology advisers voted 6 to 3 that AstraZeneca's camizestrant hadn't shown a clinically meaningful benefit. On September 4 the agency approved it anyway, conceding in its own approval that the benefit is "not yet confirmed."
CancerDecades of Cancer Warning Signs, and Still No Proof They Save Lives
England's cancer-awareness campaigns sent more people to the doctor for a decade. The reviews still can't show they caught a single cancer earlier or cut deaths, while the cancers that kill fastest stay silent until it's already too late.
Drugs & FDAThe Pancreatic-Cancer Pill That Doubles Survival: $39,800 a Month, and a Fast Lane Congress Never Approved
Rasonque roughly doubles median survival in metastatic pancreatic cancer. Revolution Medicines priced it at $477,600 a year, more than double Keytruda, and the FDA cleared it early through a voucher program lawmakers say Congress never authorized.
CancerUC Irvine's 'Framework' for Safer CAR-T Is a Hypothesis Essay, Not a Study
The senior author consults for Kite Pharma, whose Yescarta accounted for all 6 grade-5 neurotoxicity deaths in the cited review's real-world data, the exact harm the paper proposes to treat.
CancerThe Cells That Heal Wounds Are Feeding Breast Cancer Its Nerves
University of Oklahoma researchers blocked the protein in mice and triple-negative tumors grew far less. In patients, all they have is a correlation and a drug, already sold for something else, that has never been tried against breast cancer.
CancerThe Cancer Trials That Buried Vitamin C Never Put It in a Vein
Mayo's famous trials gave advanced cancer patients vitamin C by mouth and found nothing. A randomized trial that delivered it by IV, at a dose pills cannot reach, doubled survival in metastatic pancreatic cancer.
Drugs & FDAThe FDA Twice Called This Melanoma Trial Uninterpretable. Then It Approved the Drug, at $450,000 a Course.
Federal reviewers rejected Replimune's melanoma therapy twice, faulting a single-arm trial they called not adequate and well-controlled and its results uninterpretable. No new controlled data ever answered them. After a 10-3 advisory vote, the FDA approved it anyway, at $450,000 a course.
CancerThe Reason Immunotherapy Bounces Off Prostate Cancer: Tumors Chew Off a Genetic Tail to Blind the Immune System
Prostate tumors overproduce a protein that destroys the immune system's docking targets. A CRISPR tool that blocks the trick made checkpoint drugs work again, so far only in mice.
CancerThe Genes Driving Cancer's Growth Are the Same Ones It Keeps Breaking
The same super-enhancers that make a tumor grow keep snapping its DNA, and the botched repairs are where the next mutations come from. The finding is real, careful, and already a year old.
CancerA Week Instead of a Month: The Faster Prostate Radiation Was Only "As Safe" on the Coarser Ruler
PACE-C put five-fraction radiation against the four-week course in 1,208 men. On the old grading scale they matched. On the finer one the short course logged 17 percent bowel toxicity against 10 percent, and the trial still can't say whether the shorter beam controls cancer as well.
CancerThe Same Cancer Mutation, Opposite Effects: What 581 Mouse Tumors Say About Who Gets Sick
Cambridge and Yale gave four strains of mice one identical dose of a carcinogen. The tumors converged on the same pathway but took four different genetic routes to get there, and today's screening ignores the reason.
CancerThe Evolutionary Fix for Drug Resistance Works Best on a Tumor Too Small to Find
City St George's mathematicians say hitting a tumor at its weakest moment can drive it extinct. Their own model clears 95 percent only below 7 million cells, far smaller than any tumor a scan can find.
CancerA Cancer Algorithm Found Answers in 71 Children. The 'Quantum' Label Is the Least Interesting Thing About It.
A University of Utah team used the linear algebra of quantum mechanics to pull two survival predictors from just 71 neuroblastoma patients. The science is real. The word doing the marketing is not.
CancerA Repair Gene Turns Saboteur, and a $4 Billion Drug Class Sees an Opening
A Penn State lab found that too much of the DNA repair gene EXO1 makes ordinary tumors behave like BRCA-mutant ones in a dish, and respond to the same drugs. The science is clean. The market context is not.
CancerThe "Secret Reason" Cancer Drugs Stop Working Was Published in February
A Montreal team's antibody against the SLAMF6 brake on T cells made the rounds this week as a fresh discovery. The paper went up in February, the work is in mice, and the antibody has not been given to a person.
CancerIvermectin and Cancer: The Review the Horse-Paste Crowd Wasn't Supposed to Get
A 2025 systematic review finds coherent anticancer biology in ivermectin across ten tumor types. The human evidence to match it does not exist. The question of why is what the punchline was designed to bury.
Drugs & FDAThe Macaques Get a Reprieve. Pharma Gets a Faster Pipeline.
The FDA's new draft guidance lets oncology developers cut animal studies for certain biologics and conjugated products. The replacement laboratory methods are still being validated.
CancerSix melanoma patients, six weeks, one common variable: the question oncology is choosing not to study
An oncologist's bedside pattern, a Senate hearing, and a mechanism paper sitting in a mainstream oncology journal: the case that repeated mRNA boosters may be lifting the brakes off cancers oncologists thought they had quiet is no longer fringe enough to wave away.
CancerALTAIR Missed Its Primary Endpoint. The Press Tour Found Something Else.
A phase 3 trial testing chemotherapy in ctDNA-positive colorectal cancer patients missed its primary endpoint at p=0.107, and a post-hoc reanalysis is doing the public-facing work.
CancerPancreatic cancer's undruggable wall just cracked. The follow-up is 8.5 months and the money was already placed.
Revolution Medicines' daraxonrasib nearly doubled median overall survival versus chemotherapy in previously treated metastatic pancreatic cancer at ASCO 2026, with 8.5 months of follow-up and a two-billion-dollar Royalty Pharma deal already riding on what comes next.