It is unlikely that we will ever declare a final victory over cancer. Governments have often promised it: from Nixon’s 1971 “war on cancer” to the 2016 Obama‑Biden plan to fight and cure it “once and for all” and Sajid Javid’s 2022 “war on cancer” initiative in the UK. But framing it this way can obscure how real progress is made: not in stunning routs, but in stalling and turning back the advance of this terrible condition – often in simply giving people more time to live.
Several such breakthroughs, and a bigger one that could transform the treatment of multiple kinds of cancer over the next decade, emerged at last week’s American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting in Chicago. As the Guardian revealed, there is a new jab effective against head and neck cancers in some patients, and a new immunotherapy that could spare bladder cancer patients invasive and life-changing surgery. Most significantly, there is a new drug called daraxonrasib, which doubled survival time for pancreatic cancer patients in a recent clinical trial.
