Every year, the world’s cancer researchers gather in Chicago for the biggest date in their calendar: the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) annual meeting.

ASCO is where cancer scientists share their latest findings and discoveries, giving us all a glimpse of how preventing, diagnosing and treating cancer might change in the years to come.

Throughout the 2026 conference, Cancer Research UK’s experts were on hand to review some of the biggest and most interesting studies and announcements. We’ve gathered it all together in this article.

Daily pancreatic cancer pill shows “unprecedented” improvement in survival

A new targeted treatment can double the average survival time for patients with advanced pancreatic cancer, according to an international phase 3 trial. It’s such a breakthrough, it drew a standing ovation from the ASCO crowd.

Pancreatic cancer is one of the hardest cancers to stop. It grows quickly, resists traditional treatments and rarely causes clear symptoms until it reaches its later stages.

Scientists have spent a long time studying the biology of pancreatic cancer to find better ways to treat it. One big focus has been a group of genes in our cells called RAS genes, primarily one called KRAS. Mutations to these genes drive more than 9 out of 10 pancreatic cancers, but they’re very difficult to target.

“KRAS used to be considered undruggable, like nothing could touch it,” explained Dr Sam Godfrey, our science engagement lead. “It was a bit like a light that’s stuck on, with no actual switch to turn it off.”

Now, though, researchers have found a way to access the wiring.

In a 500-person trial, daraxonrasib, a daily pill designed to block the growth-powering proteins made by RAS genes, increased the average survival time for people with advanced, previously treated pancreatic cancer from 6.7 months to 13.2 months. The drug also caused fewer side effects than chemotherapy.

“Research has pretty much doubled survival rates across all cancers bar a few, but pancreatic cancer is one of those really stubborn cancers which has lagged behind,” said Godfrey, who called the results “unprecedented”.

“Anything which gives people more time when they have such an intractable, difficult-to-treat cancer is really, really exciting.”

Next, medicine regulators will need to evaluate the data to ensure daraxonrasib is suitable for use as a standard treatment.

“It’s quite hard to say how long that’s going to take, but with such strong results as this, I would hope the process will move fairly swiftly,” said Godfrey.

Triple-action ‘cancer jab’ clears out advanced head and neck cancers 

Other new treatments are finding success by targeting cancer cells from multiple angles at once.

Amivantamab is one example. On the one side, it can block off two important switches cancers trigger to grow, spread and survive, and, on the other, it can help reveal cancer cells to the immune system. 

The NHS already offers amivantamab, which is given as an injection, as a treatment for some lung cancers. Now, an international trial led by the Institute of Cancer Research in London has shown its potential for treating advanced head and neck cancer, too. 

The OrigAMI-4 study gave amivantamab to 102 people with head and neck cancer that had spread or come back and wasn’t responding to other treatments. It shrank or eradicated 43 of those patients’ tumours.

“Treatment for head and neck cancer can have a profound impact on patients’ daily lives,” said Dr Sarah Halford, the head of medical sciences at Cancer Research UK’s Centre for Drug Development. “These results suggest this targeted treatment has the potential to offer a new option for some people whose cancer has stopped responding to standard care.

“Seeing tumours shrink in over 40% of patients – with no detectable signs of cancer in 15% – is encouraging. And importantly, this drug is given as a simple injection, making it quicker, more convenient, and potentially easier to tolerate.”

A promising new treatment for advanced bowel cancer

With our support, a separate early stage trial at the ICR has shown that adding another new targeted drug to chemotherapy could help shrink and control advanced bowel (colorectal) cancers.

The INBRX-109 clinical trial is testing ozekibart, which is designed to kill cancer cells by activating a protein on their surface called death receptor 5, in combination with FOLFIRI chemotherapy, a standard treatment for advanced bowel cancer.

Dr Hazel Lote, a researcher backed by the Bowelbabe Fund for Cancer Research UK, is one of the lead investigators on the trial.

“These early results are promising for patients with advanced colorectal cancer who have very few treatment options left,” said Lote, who works at the Royal Marsden NHS Trust and the ICR.

“The combination of ozekibart plus FOLFIRI not only shrank tumours in some patients, but stopped the cancer from worsening in many others, suggesting this treatment combination could offer a promising new treatment option. While this is still an early-stage trial, the findings are really encouraging for this patient group where there are very few treatment options and supports further research into this treatment.”

Unlocking the power of immunotherapy for more cancers 

Yet another new type of drug, this one designed to make it harder for hard-to-treat cancers to hide from the immune system, also made headlines around ASCO. It helped make immunotherapy more effective for people with six different types of cancer. 

This was in a phase 1 trial designed to test the safety of the drug, which is so new it’s known only as GRWD5769. Researchers combined it with immunotherapy for 83 patients with advanced cancers that had resisted other treatments, and almost 1 in 3 of these patients’ tumours shrank.

“Immunotherapy has transformed treatment for some cancers, but it doesn’t yet work for everyone,” said Godfrey.  

“It’s unusual to see such outcomes in patients whose cancers have already stopped responding to treatment, particularly across several hard‑to‑treat cancer types, so these results are encouraging.  

“However, this is still an early‑stage study, and larger trials will be needed to determine whether this approach can deliver lasting benefits for patients.” 

Boosting the immune system stops bladder cancer without surgery 

The established immunotherapy drug durvalumab is showing signs it can help stop bladder cancers without the need for surgery, according to another ICR-led study at ASCO.

In the phase 2 RAD-IO trial, doctors used durvalumab alongside chemotherapy and radiotherapy to treat bladder cancer that has grown into the muscle wall around the bladder.  

In too many cases, this advanced form of bladder cancer (often called muscle-invasive bladder cancer) can come back after treatment. Surgery is one way to lower that risk, but the operation can be life-altering. It involves removing the bladder and giving people a new way to pass urine.

According to the early results RAD-IO’s researchers shared at ASCO, immunotherapy could help more people stay cancer-free without having to face those side effects.

A year after treatment, more than 8 in 10 people who received durvalumab on the trial had no signs of bladder cancer. That’s a big boost from previous studies, which found that 6 out of 10 patients treated with chemoradiation alone were cancer-free one year on. 

“Radical surgery can cause serious side effects for bladder cancer patients,” says Michelle Mitchell, our chief executive. “Finding kinder ways to treat the disease is incredibly important, and this trial has done exactly that.

Durvalumab is already approved to approved to treat NHS patients with muscle-invasive bladder cancer in combination with surgery, and now there’s hope it can play an even more prominent role in future.  

“Further research will be needed at a larger scale to know for sure, but these results have the potential to be life-changing for some bladder cancer patients,” said Mitchell. “Breakthroughs just like this are essential to ensure people affected by cancer can live not just longer lives, but better lives.” 

A genomic test can help stop breast cancer without chemotherapy 

Another step forward for targeted treatment came through the international OPTIMA trial, led by researchers at University College London and the University of Glasgow. It showed that a new type of DNA test could help thousands of women with breast cancer safely avoid chemotherapy, potentially sparing them from difficult side effects.

Doctors regularly use chemotherapy to help lower the risk that the most common, hormone‑sensitive type of early-stage breast cancer might return after surgery or radiotherapy. Until now, though, it’s been difficult to tell whether the risk is already so low that chemotherapy won’t bring any extra benefit.

OPTIMA trialled a more personalised approach by using a genomic test to measure the activity of the genes that make breast cancer cells grow. It found that when those activity levels are low people can safely be treated with hormone therapy alone.

The test, called Prosigna, uses small samples of breast cancer tissue taken during surgery and can be run in NHS laboratories. Based on their trial, the researchers estimate it could help 5,000 NHS breast cancer patients avoid chemotherapy every year.

“OPTIMA addresses a long-standing challenge in breast cancer care: identifying who truly benefits from chemotherapy and who does not,” explained UCL Professor Rob Stein, who presented the results of the trial at ASCO. “Our findings show that many patients can safely avoid chemotherapy without compromising their outcomes.”

The NHS’s multi-cancer blood test screening trial misses its goal

Not every result can be positive. A big topic of discussion on day two of ASCO was the NHS’s 142,000-person trial of the GRAIL Galleri liquid biopsy, which is designed to detect more than 50 types of cancer by looking for unusual signals in people’s blood. After years of interest and headlines, the trial has failed to meet its main objective.

The NHS-Galleri trial gave the blood test to people without any cancer symptoms three times in three years. Its goal was to reduce the proportion of cancers diagnosed in stages 3 and 4 compared to people who weren’t given the test.

These late-stage cancers have grown and spread beyond where they started and are harder for doctors to treat successfully. Finding them earlier, in stage 1 or 2, is a major goal of cancer screening and can help more people survive.

The results presented at ASCO show that the test didn’t achieve this late-to-early ‘stage shift’ across the group of 12 cancers chosen for the trial. There were some encouraging signs, including fewer cancers being diagnosed in stage 4, but for now there’s not enough evidence to support introducing the test to NHS screening more widely.

“At this point, we don’t know if the test could reduce cancer deaths in people without symptoms,” said Dr Ian Walker, our executive director of policy. “We’ll need to analyse that data when it becomes available to assess if and how the test could be used in the NHS in future.”

And a negative result is no reason to give up. Earlier this year, liquid biopsy expert Professor Nitzan Rosenfeld joined That Cancer Conversation to discuss how cancer-detecting blood tests work. He talked through the strengths and limitations of the Galleri test and explained how much technology has moved on since it was first designed.

You can watch or listen to the full episode for more.

Early hints that weight loss drugs could slow some cancers down

There’s a lot of evidence that weight loss drugs (GLP-1 receptor agonists) like Mounjaro, Ozempic and Wegovy can help people keep a healthy weight. A high body mass index (BMI) is a risk factor for multiple types of cancer, so our researchers are investigating whether these drugs could help prevent the disease.

Another research team at the Cleveland Clinic in the US has been asking similar questions about GLP-1 drugs and cancer treatment.

Their study, which they’re presenting at ASCO, compared real-world data from more than 12,000 people who started taking different types of diabetes medication (the original use of GLP-1 drugs) after they were diagnosed with cancer. It found that people taking GLP-1s were less likely to see certain cancers reach stage 4 than people who took drugs called gliptins.

“This is an early observational study looking at the medical records of people with cancer taking GLP-1 drugs used for diabetes and weight loss,” explained Mei Chen from our science engagement team. “It doesn’t show a definitive link between GLP-1 drugs and cancer progression, and other factors could contribute to the differences seen between patients.”

The lead researcher, Dr Mark Orland, said the results provide early evidence that scientists should pursue more studies into how weight loss drugs could help against cancer.

Some of that work is already underway. In the lab, researchers are testing whether GLP-1s might deprive cancer cells of fuel, reduce the inflammation that helps them grow and spread, or help immune cells target them more effectively. Beyond that – and before GLP-1s can become part of cancer care – good-quality clinical trials will need to directly prove that they can have positive impacts for cancer patients and don’t, for instance, interfere with other treatments.

“There’s growing interest in the longer-term effects of GLP-1 medications, including any possible links with cancer outcomes, but it’s still an emerging area of research and there are no clear answers yet,” said Chen.

“People should not change or start any medication based on this research and should speak to their doctor first if they are considering using weight loss drugs.”

Time for a closer look at sleep and cancer risk?

Two other observational studies presented at ASCO, which looked at millions of US health records, picked up a possible association between insomnia and an increased risk of some types of cancer in adults under 50.

Cancer is much rarer in younger adults than in over-50s, but cases of what’s called early-onset cancer are rising around the world. There are likely to be lots of reasons behind this, so we’re funding research groups like Cancer Grand Challenges team PROSPECT to investigate the problem from all sides.

These two studies suggest that insomnia (regular difficulty falling or staying asleep) could be an important angle to consider. After analysing health data from more than 18 million adults under 50 in the US, researchers found that people diagnosed with insomnia were more likely to develop early-onset bowel, breast, uterine or ovarian cancer than others their age.

Still, Godfrey, our science engagement lead, cautioned that, even when they include millions of people, observational studies can’t prove direct links on their own.

“The thing is, when we have huge datasets like this, it’s very easy to find patterns that don’t necessarily exist,” he explained. “So, for example, global sea temperatures have been rising steadily for the last couple of hundred years. In that time, piracy has declined, but no one is suggesting that pirates were keeping the seas cold.

“The thing to really point out here is that we know what the big causes of cancer are. We know that smoking, being overweight, not staying safe in the sun, etc., can all increase your risk of cancer. And, of course, we know that cancer predominantly affects older people, as well. Those things remain absolutely true.

“Based on this paper, I don’t think anyone should be worrying as yet. We need to do more research. But what I would say is, if anyone is worried at all, they should go and see their doctor, have that conversation and get checked out, because the sooner you see the doctor, the sooner something can be done.”