In a darkened convention hall in Chicago on May 31, a Harvard oncologist named Brian Wolpin stood on the platform and in a voice that sounded like he was reading from a phone book, he recited a set of numbers that brought a room of oncologists to their feet in 42 seconds. Adam Feuerstein, a biotech writer for the health news website Stat who has covered such cancer conferences for two decades, said he was I have never witnessed anything like it. The applause lasted so long that Wolpin, shocked, said: “That time was not built into my conversation.”
What Wolpin had just shown attendees at the annual meeting of the American Medical Association (ASCO) was a simple model: a drug called daraxonrasib. he had almost twice the average life expectancy in general in a 500-patient trial of previously treated pancreatic cancer. ASCO chief medical officer Julie Gralow he mentioned the results not a home run but a “grand slam.” Toronto oncologist Jennifer Knox called it a “game changer.”
Wolpin found such an interesting response at ASCO because pancreatic cancer is among the most deadly and treatment-resistant cancers. killing more than 50,000 Americans a yearamong them Supreme Court Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Cancer has a five-year survival rate in young adults.
Wolpin, who began his career in the mid-2000s at the state-of-the-art Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, he told The Bulwark: “I think I saw several patients that first year of fellowship who had pancreatic cancer, and they all died after three months. It shouldn’t be happening here, right? You should have noticed this.” For decades after President Richard Nixon declared a “war on cancer,” deaths it continued to rise and clinical progress for most cancers remained very small.
But the change is going well. The US death rate from cancer has decreased by 34 percent from its 1991 peak to 2023, and a relative of five years survival for all cancers combined it reached 70 percent for people diagnosed between 2015 to 2021, up from 50 percent in the 1970s. And while daraxonrasib got a lot of hype, it was the loudest moment in a week — and a decade — of solid wins, including victories against cancer.
The immune system, evolved
One major catalyst for change is immunotherapy. Instead of attacking the tumor directly like conventional chemotherapy, this treatment uses the patient’s immune system to hunt down and kill cancer cells. You can see the powerful effects of immunotherapy through the story of former President Jimmy Carterwho was diagnosed in 2015 at the age of 90 with metastatic melanoma that had spread to his liver and brain. That should have been a signal to newspaper editors to immediately update their planned archives; yet after treatment with the immunosuppressive drug pembrolizumab, along with surgery and radiation, Carter watched her tumor disappear and managed to live another decade.
And scientists continue to push the boundaries further. Moderna and Merck reported that a combination of a individual mRNA coverage – the technology behind the Covid shots, retrained on each patient’s own tumor – and an immunotherapy drug (pembrolizumab) reduced the risk of recurrence or death in malignant melanoma by 49 percent after five years. In small, early The Memorial Sloan Kettering Trial such a vaccine appeared to help some pancreatic cancer patients stay cancer-free for a long time after surgery. Seven of the eight patients who responded to the vaccine were still alive four to six years later, and larger trials are now underway.
A The Memorial Sloan Kettering Trial of such a vaccine in 2024 prevented pancreatic cancer in patients whose immune systems responded. And for blood cancer, one infusion of regenerated immune cells – called CAR T-cell therapy – has begun to offer something that is close to a cure: Emily Whitehead, the first child with cancer ever treated with CAR T, is now more than a decade cancer-free and attending university. (I he wrote in more detail about immunotherapy and CAR T last year.)
From treatment to prevention
And scientists’ ambitions are growing, from treating cancer to stopping it before it starts. Last week, a team led by Charles Swanton of the Francis Crick Institute reported that a blood test that measures 14 proteins, along with risk factors such as age, smoking and lung disease, may help. identify people who may develop lung cancer years before diagnosis. They also found an interesting clue from an older drug trial: An anti-inflammatory drug appeared to cut the risk of lung cancer by nearly half among people with the highest levels of inflammation.
This is still early evidence — not yet the blood tests and preventative treatments doctors can offer patients — but Swanton compared it to how statins work for heart disease. Just as cholesterol tests can predict a person’s risk of heart disease, and then statins can be prescribed to lower cholesterol, protein tests detect lung cancer risk and anti-inflammatory drugs reduce it.
And no story about modern medical miracles would be complete without the appearance of GLP-1 drugs, which seem to do everything. A University of Pennsylvania study of more than 110,000 women, also reported at the ASCO meeting this week, found that taking GLP-1 drugs such as Ozempic was associated with approximately 30 percent lower breast cancer incidence.
Both results are preliminary, so we shouldn’t expect big changes right away. It is it took decades between the development of the test for LDL cholesterol levels, the introduction of statins, and the indisputable proof of prevention of heart disease. But oncology is clearly moving towards finding cancer before it takes hold, as it were we have a heart attack.
Medical advances come with real costs. New drugs are brutally expensive, with the average monthly price of a new cancer drug more than twice between 2009 and 2019, when about half of American cancer patients diagnosed and survivors have to take on debt to pay for treatment.
Many of those high prices it will eventually fallonce the patent expires and general releases occur. But the biggest concern is that the scientific engine driving this progress is being slowed. Almost every advance I mentioned can be traced back to basic government-sponsored research, which The Trump administration has been on the attack tirelessly.
In 2025, the administration freeze or cancel thousands of National Institutes of Health (NIH) and National Science Foundation (NSF) grants, while new NIH awards dropped by billions of dollars. Congress later rejected the most profound cuts to the NIH, but the damage was already real: Hundreds of NIH-funded clinical trials were disrupted, and early career scientists became less likely to win major grants. In saving dollars for those rebates, we risk losing potentially life-saving discoveries, at a time when cancer research is thriving.
The cost of that life was held at the ASCO meeting. In the opening remarks, outgoing ASCO president Eric Small he talked about his partnerAmy Lin, University of San Francisco San Francisco oncologist. Lin died in December of metastatic clear cell ovarian cancera dangerous disease that still has few treatment options. He brought grief expert and author David Kessler to give a talk on compassionate end-of-life care.
Perhaps more than any other medical specialty, grief and loss have always been an inseparable, if rarely discussed, part of oncology. Brian Wolpin began his career watching pancreatic cancer patients die within months and felt it shouldn’t happen at a place like Dana-Farber. The joy he got was the sound of the room realizing that he might be right – that a disease that had once seemed incurable was beginning to lose its deadly power.
A version of this story originally appeared in Habari Njema magazine. Register here!
