News
Curated oncology headlines from reputable sources, ranked by importance with Claude Opus 4.7.
Reactivating p53 mutants selectively in patients
A commentary published in Cancer Cell highlights encouraging clinical results for rezatapopt, a small-molecule reactivator of mutant p53, recently reported in the New England Journal of Medicine. The tumor suppressor p53 is the most frequently mutated protein across human cancers and has long been considered an undruggable target, making any clinically meaningful progress against it a landmark eve…
Improving immunotherapy in solid tumors using FMT
A study published in Cell reports that fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT) significantly enhances the efficacy of first-line immune checkpoint inhibitors across multiple solid tumor types, including renal cell carcinoma, cutaneous melanoma, and non-small cell lung cancer. Clinical trial data showed that the benefit was achieved with an acceptable safety profile and appeared to be mediated by fu…
In what clinical settings are the MASAI trial results applicable?
Nature Reviews Clinical Oncology has published a commentary analyzing the clinical significance of the MASAI (Mammography Screening with Artificial Intelligence) trial, which is believed to be the first randomized controlled trial of AI-supported mammography interpretation to evaluate interval cancer rates as an endpoint. The Swedish trial demonstrated that using artificial intelligence to triage …
A 2026 update on myelodysplastic neoplasms: current state, challenges and future directions
A comprehensive review published in Nature Reviews Clinical Oncology provides a 2026 update on myelodysplastic neoplasms (MDS), a heterogeneous group of blood cancers characterized by ineffective blood cell production and a risk of progression to acute myeloid leukemia. The authors report that the epidemiological burden of MDS appears to be rising and detail recent advances in diagnosis, molecular…
Harnessing foundation models for digital pathology without re-training
Researchers have developed PRET, a training-free framework that adapts pathology foundation models to a wide range of clinical oncology tasks without the need for labeled data or model retraining. Published in Nature Cancer, the study demonstrates robust performance across pan-cancer diagnosis applications including cancer screening, tumor subtyping, tissue segmentation, and metastasis detection. …
Epigenetic fingerprints link early-onset colon and rectal cancer to pesticide exposure
A study published in Nature Medicine has identified epigenetic signatures linking pesticide exposure — particularly the herbicide picloram — to early-onset colorectal cancer in patients diagnosed before age 50. Researchers compared exposome traits between early-onset CRC patients and those diagnosed at age 70 or older, using epigenetic markers as molecular records of cumulative environmental expos…
Pembrolizumab With or Without Lenvatinib as First-Line Therapy for Recurrent or Metastatic Head and Neck Squamous Cell Carcinoma: Phase III LEAP-010 Study
The Phase III LEAP-010 trial, published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, evaluated whether adding the multi-kinase inhibitor lenvatinib to pembrolizumab improves outcomes in patients with PD-L1-positive recurrent or metastatic head and neck squamous cell carcinoma treated in the first-line setting. The study compared pembrolizumab plus lenvatinib against pembrolizumab plus placebo, with overal…
[News] 2026 Society of Surgical Oncology Annual Meeting
At the 2026 Society of Surgical Oncology Annual Meeting, Martin Heidinger presented results from a preplanned analysis of the TAXIS/OPBC-03 phase 3 trial, which evaluated tailored axillary surgery (TAS) as an alternative to standard axillary lymph node dissection (ALND) in patients with node-positive breast cancer. The trial investigated whether reducing axillary tumour burden through a less radic…
Reliable detection of Host-Microbe Signatures in cancer using PRISM
Researchers led by Ghaddar et al. have developed PRISM, a new computational framework designed to accurately identify microbial organisms and remove contamination artifacts from human cancer genomic data. By applying PRISM to two of the largest cancer genomics repositories — The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and the Clinical Proteomic Tumor Analysis Consortium (CPTAC) — the team uncovered robust host…
Knowledge-enhanced pretraining for vision-language pathology foundation model on cancer diagnosis
Researchers led by Zhou et al. have developed KEEP, a knowledge-enhanced foundation model that integrates structured disease knowledge into vision-language pretraining for computational pathology. Published in the prestigious journal Cancer Cell, the approach combines curated medical knowledge graphs with large-scale pathology image-text datasets to improve AI-driven cancer diagnosis. The model de…