Technologies

An antibody-drug conjugate is a guided missile: an antibody homes to the tumour cell, is swallowed, and releases a chemotherapy so potent it could never be given on its own.

A bispecific antibody is one antibody with two different grabbing arms, so it can block two targets at once or pull an immune cell onto a cancer cell.

In boron neutron capture therapy a boron drug accumulates in tumour cells, then a neutron beam makes only those cells explode from inside.

A patient's T cells are removed, given a synthetic receptor that recognises the cancer, multiplied, and put back as a living drug.

Pills that stop the cell-division engine, added to hormone therapy for the most common type of breast cancer.

Cytokine therapy gives immune-signalling proteins as drugs. High-dose interleukin-2 was the first immunotherapy to cure some melanomas, at great toxicity.

Drugs that change how genes are switched on and off without changing the DNA itself.

Drugs against the most common cancer gene, considered impossible to target until sotorasib in 2021.

Viruses engineered to infect and burst cancer cells while leaving normal cells alone, and to alert the immune system in the process.

Pills that block a DNA repair backup, killing cancer cells that already lost their main repair system (BRCA).

A radioactive version of the hormone mimic used for the scan; it homes to neuroendocrine tumour cells and irradiates them from inside.

Like an ADC but with a small targeting peptide instead of an antibody, so it penetrates tumours faster and is cheaper to make.

Isolating the liver's circulation with catheters and balloons so that high-dose melphalan can be pumped through it and filtered out before it reaches the rest of the body; approved in 2023 for eye melanoma that has spread to the liver.

An antibody carries a light-sensitive dye to the tumour; shining near-infrared light then bursts the cells.

Instead of blocking a protein, these drugs tag it for the cell's own garbage disposal, removing it entirely.

A drug that finds tumour cells and carries a radioactive atom that irradiates them from inside the body.

Finding a second gene that a cancer needs only because its first gene is broken, then hitting the second one.

An off-the-shelf drug that physically links a killer T cell to a cancer cell, forcing the attack.

T cells engineered with a receptor that sees fragments of proteins inside the cancer cell, reaching targets CAR-T cannot.

Immune cells that have already found their way into the tumour are harvested, grown to billions, and returned.

Wearable electrodes that deliver alternating electric fields disrupting cancer cell division.

For low-risk prostate cancer, monitoring with PSA, MRI, and repeat biopsy instead of treating, because most such cancers never cause harm.

Replacing a patient's blood system with a donor's, so the donor's immune cells hunt down any leukaemia left behind. Still the only cure for many high-risk leukaemias.

Androgen deprivation lowers testosterone or blocks its receptor, and has been the foundation of prostate cancer treatment since 1941 (Nobel Prize 1966).

Anti-angiogenic therapy cuts off the tumour's blood supply; it is now mostly used to help immunotherapy work better.

Antibody manufacturing means growing antibody drugs like pembrolizumab or trastuzumab in vats of engineered hamster cells, then purifying them. It is the industrial base for most modern cancer drugs.

The drugs that stopped chemotherapy from meaning days of vomiting: 5-HT3 blockers (ondansetron, palonosetron), NK1 blockers (aprepitant), dexamethasone and olanzapine, given by the emetic risk of each regimen.

Apheresis is collecting a patient's white blood cells through a machine over several hours. Every autologous CAR-T begins here, and the quality of these cells shapes the final product.

Collect the patient's own blood-forming stem cells, give a very high dose of chemotherapy that would otherwise destroy the marrow, then give the cells back to rebuild it.

A small tube placed by endoscope or through the skin reopens a blocked bile duct, relieving jaundice so chemotherapy can be given.

Zoledronic acid and denosumab reduce fractures, spinal cord compression and bone pain from bone metastases and myeloma, prevent treatment-induced bone loss, and in postmenopausal breast cancer modestly reduce recurrence in bone.

Brachytherapy places a radioactive source directly inside or next to the tumour.

Systematic treatment of cancer pain with opioids, adjuvant drugs, radiation and procedures such as nerve blocks and intrathecal pumps. Most pain can be controlled, yet under-treatment remains common, especially where opioids are unavailable.

The public systems that count every cancer diagnosis and death in a country, which tell us whether incidence and survival are improving.

Blood clots are the second commonest cause of death in people with cancer. Risk scores identify who should take preventive blood thinners during chemotherapy, and direct oral anticoagulants have largely replaced injections for treatment.

Drugs or surgery for people at high inherited risk, before any cancer appears.

Clinical trial software is the set of systems that collect trial data, randomise patients, and keep every form auditable.

Finding and removing polyps before they become cancer. Colonoscopy prevents cancer; stool and blood tests catch it early and get more people screened.

Looking at the cervix with a magnifier after a positive screen, then removing the abnormal patch with an electric wire loop in a clinic visit.

The clinics where most cancer patients are actually treated, increasingly organised into large networks that also run trials.

The test that decides whether a specific drug is right for you, approved together with the drug.

Sequencing hundreds of cancer genes at once from a biopsy to find the mutations a drug can target.

Companies that run clinical trials for sponsors: sites, monitoring, data, and regulatory filing.

A CT scan is a fast 3D X-ray that shows the size and shape of tumours and whether they have spread.

Cystoscopy and TURBT mean looking inside the bladder with a camera and shaving off tumours through the urethra. Blue-light dyes make flat tumours easier to see.

Looking at the leukaemia's chromosomes under a microscope, or lighting up specific gene breaks with fluorescent probes, to classify risk.

Cytotoxic chemotherapy drugs kill rapidly dividing cells. They are still curative in testicular cancer, lymphoma, leukaemia, and many early-stage cancers, and they are the warhead inside ADCs.

Specialist care for symptoms, decision-making and quality of life given alongside cancer treatment from diagnosis, not just at the end. Trials show it improves quality of life and mood and may lengthen survival.

Pills that block or remove oestrogen signalling, the mainstay of treatment for hormone-driven breast cancer for 50 years.

Removing very early cancers of the oesophagus or stomach from the inside with an endoscope, so the organ is kept intact.

Instead of starving patients before and after an operation, modern surgical pathways feed them early, give carbohydrate drinks the night before, and get them walking the next day. Complications and hospital stays fall.

FDG PET is the standard PET scan. A radioactive sugar shows which tissues are burning glucose fast, which most cancers do.

A test of the DNA you were born with, to find inherited risk genes such as BRCA or Lynch syndrome.

Injections of filgrastim or its long-acting form pegfilgrastim after chemotherapy make white cells recover faster, cutting the risk of life-threatening infections and allowing chemotherapy on schedule.

People with cirrhosis or chronic hepatitis B get a liver ultrasound and a blood test every six months so cancer is caught while it is still curable.

Histology automation is the robots that process tissue into slides and stain them for biomarkers such as HER2 and PD-L1, the same way every time.

Histopathology means looking at cancer cells under a microscope, and immunohistochemistry stains them for specific proteins. Together they are still the foundation of every diagnosis.

Care in the last months of life focused entirely on comfort, at home or in a hospice, when cancer treatment no longer helps. Enrolling earlier than the typical two to three weeks gives patients and families more benefit.

Vaccines that prevent the viral infections behind cervical, throat, anal, and liver cancers. The most effective anti-cancer intervention ever created.

A swab tested for the virus that causes cervical cancer, more accurate than the Pap smear and doable at home.

Tests that reveal whether a tumour has a broken DNA repair system, which predicts response to PARP inhibitors and platinum.

Independent radiologists who re-read every scan in a trial the same way, so response rates mean the same thing across hospitals.

Antibodies that release the brakes on immune cells so they can attack the cancer. They cure a minority of patients across many cancers, something chemotherapy rarely does.

Radiation shaped precisely to the tumour and checked with daily imaging, sparing surrounding organs.

Infusion devices are the implanted ports, smart pumps, and take-home pumps that deliver chemotherapy safely, including 46-hour infusions patients carry home.

Treating early bladder cancer by putting the drug straight into the bladder through a catheter, so the whole body is spared.

Removing a bone or soft-tissue sarcoma while keeping the arm or leg, rebuilding with metal implants, bone grafts or growing prostheses in children.

A blood test that reads fragments of DNA shed by the tumour, so you can genotype or monitor cancer without a needle in the tumour.

Replacing the whole diseased liver cures both the cancer and the cirrhosis underneath it, for patients whose tumours are small enough.

A yearly low-radiation CT scan for current and former heavy smokers that finds lung cancer early enough to cure it.

Low-dose breast X-ray used for screening. Newer 3D versions find more cancers with fewer false alarms.

The particle accelerators and shielded robotic chemistry boxes that make PET tracers in hospital basements and commercial pharmacies.

Lab-made immune proteins that lock onto one target, either blocking it or flagging the cell for destruction.

Uses magnets and radio waves, no radiation, to give very detailed pictures of soft tissue such as brain, breast, liver, and prostate.

Regular meetings where surgeons, oncologists, radiologists, pathologists and others review each patient's case together and agree a plan; mandatory in many countries and associated with more guideline-concordant care.

Flow cytometry MRD counts leukaemia cells in the bone marrow one at a time by their surface proteins, down to one in ten thousand.

An MRI before biopsy that finds the cancers that matter and lets many men skip biopsy altogether.

Sequencing the unique genetic barcode of a patient's leukaemia to find one cancer cell in a million.

The ordering and record systems oncologists use every day, including built-in treatment pathways that steer drug choice.

Specialist nurses deliver most cancer treatment and much of its safety, education and support; nurse-led clinics, navigation and symptom management improve outcomes and are the backbone of care in low-resource settings.

Short courses of radiation, often a single treatment, to relieve pain from bone metastases, stop bleeding, open blocked airways or protect the spinal cord. Among the most cost-effective treatments in cancer.

Most small kidney tumours found on scans grow slowly. Options range from watching them, to freezing or heating them, to removing just the tumour and keeping the kidney.

A scan that shows where a radioactive tracer accumulates, so it images what tumours are doing rather than what they look like.

Making PSMA, FDG, and new tracers under drug-manufacturing rules and delivering them daily.

Scan after two cycles of chemotherapy; if the tumour has gone dark, give less treatment, and if not, give more. Hodgkin lymphoma pioneered this.

PET and CT in one machine, so hot spots on the PET are pinned to exact locations on the CT.

Platinum agents such as cisplatin and carboplatin work by crosslinking DNA. They are curative in testicular cancer and central to lung, ovarian, bladder, head and neck, and TNBC treatment.

The tubes and fixatives that keep a sample stable between the patient and the lab. Unglamorous, but they decide whether a liquid biopsy or PD-L1 stain is trustworthy.

A prostate-cancer-specific PET scan that finds spread far earlier than CT or bone scan, and tells you whether a matched radioactive drug will work.

Using the thyroid's natural appetite for iodine to image and treat thyroid cancer with a radioactive form of it. The oldest theranostic, and now used more selectively than it was.

Bench-top devices that 'milk' a short-lived isotope from a long-lived parent, plus vials of ready-to-label ligand. How most hospitals make PSMA and somatostatin PET tracers without a cyclotron.

The factories and courier routes that make and deliver short-lived radioactive tracers to hospitals within hours.

The software that calculates exactly how radiation beams should be shaped and checks the machine delivered it.

The big labs that run most biomarker tests, and the reagent makers whose stains decide who gets a drug.

Surgeons operate through small incisions using robotic arms with tremor-free precision and 3D vision.

Very high, very precise radiation doses in 1-5 sessions that can ablate a tumour like surgery.

Removing just the first lymph node a tumour drains to, instead of all of them, to check for spread.

Pills that block the specific enzyme a cancer relies on. Imatinib in 2001 proved a cancer could be switched off by design.

A PET scan using a radioactive hormone mimic that lights up neuroendocrine tumours and shows whether the matching radioactive treatment will work.

SPECT and the bone scan are an older type of nuclear scan, still used for bone metastases and to check where a radioactive drug went after treatment.

Sterile fill-finish is putting the finished drug into vials under sterile conditions. It is a frequent cause of shortages when capacity is tight.

Two rounds of very high-dose chemotherapy with stem-cell rescue, back to back, used in high-risk neuroblastoma in North America.

Thermal ablation kills a tumour with heat or cold delivered through a needle, with no incision required.

Destroying precancerous cervical cells with a heated or frozen probe in under a minute, the tool that makes screen-and-treat possible where there are no surgeons.

Thyroid fine-needle aspiration takes a needle sample from a thyroid lump and grades it on a six-level scale; when the result is uncertain, a gene test on the same sample can often rule cancer out and avoid surgery.

Topoisomerase-I inhibitors work by jamming the enzyme that untangles DNA during copying. They are weak as free drugs in many cancers, but devastating when delivered by an ADC.

A catheter threaded into the artery feeding a liver tumour delivers chemotherapy and then blocks the vessel, starving the tumour from inside.

Red cell and platelet transfusions, iron and erythropoiesis-stimulating agents keep patients safe through chemotherapy and marrow failure; restrictive thresholds and ESA caution reflect trials showing more is not better.

Ultrasound uses sound waves to make live pictures; it is cheap, safe, and used to guide needles into lumps.

Daily low-dose aspirin lowers bowel cancer risk in people with Lynch syndrome and appears to cut recurrence in bowel cancers with a particular mutation. In healthy older people it caused more harm than good.

A bispecific ADC is an ADC whose antibody grabs two different proteins on the cancer cell, so it sticks better to tumour and less to healthy tissue.

Cachexia pharmacotherapy covers three drug approaches to cancer wasting: a new antibody that blocks the hormone suppressing appetite, an appetite hormone mimic approved only in Japan, and a very cheap old tablet. None is yet standard everywhere; all beat what came before.

Treating the wasting that kills many cancer patients, by blocking the hormone that suppresses appetite.

CAIX PET is a scan using an antibody against a protein almost unique to clear-cell kidney cancer, to tell cancer from benign kidney lumps without a biopsy.

Being overweight after breast cancer is linked with more recurrence, so a 3,000-woman trial tested a two-year telephone weight-loss programme. Women lost weight, but the trial did not clearly show fewer recurrences.

FAPI PET is a PET scan that lights up the scaffolding around almost any solid tumour, including cancers the standard sugar scan misses.

A single blood test intended to screen for dozens of cancers at once, including ones with no screening today.

Vaccines against mutations or proteins shared by many patients, so they can be made in advance.

A vaccine made for one patient, encoding the unique mutations in their own tumour, to train the immune system to hunt it.

Testing cheap old drugs, aspirin, metformin, statins, beta-blockers, as cancer treatments, because they are safe, available and sometimes work.

Like radioligand therapy but with alpha particles: far more destructive over a much shorter range, so single cells can be killed with less collateral damage.

The largest trial of vitamin D and fish-oil pills found they did not prevent cancer. A possible reduction in cancer deaths, and hints of benefit after a digestive cancer diagnosis, keep the question alive.

Watching very small papillary thyroid cancers with ultrasound instead of operating, because most never grow and almost none cause harm.

Joining a highly toxic payload to an antibody safely and at scale. Few contractors can do it, which shapes who can develop ADCs.

Software that draws organs and tumours on scans automatically, saving hours per patient and making daily plan adaptation practical.

Software that reads scans alongside radiologists, catching cancers earlier and predicting who is at risk.

Software, increasingly LLM-based, that reads a patient's record and finds trials or guideline options they qualify for.

Alcohol causes at least seven cancers and there is no safe threshold. Price, availability and cancer warning labels are the tools that work; most people still do not know alcohol causes cancer.

Predicts the 3D shape of proteins together with DNA, RNA, small molecules and antibodies, the starting point for much modern drug design.

Scored all 71 million possible single-letter protein changes in humans as likely harmful or benign.

People with severe obesity who have weight-loss surgery develop about a third fewer cancers over the following decade, especially womb and other hormone-related cancers, than similar people who do not.

Freezers full of consented tumour samples with matched clinical data, which every biomarker and drug programme depends on.

Curated databases that say what each mutation means for treatment, and the expert meetings that use them to decide on therapy.

Heavier charged particles that kill even radiation-resistant tumours, available at only a handful of centres worldwide.

Protecting the heart from cancer treatments, which is increasingly important as patients live longer.

Scheduling and tracking software that makes sure each patient's cells come back to that patient, on time.

The quality checks a CAR-T batch must pass before it can be given: sterile, correct identity, enough live CAR-positive cells, and no replicating virus.

Fragmentomics reads the sizes and positions of DNA fragments in blood, not the mutations. Cancer cells die messily and leave a recognisable fragmentation pattern.

A blood test that detects fragments of the virus DNA shed by HPV-positive throat cancers, to confirm diagnosis, track response, and catch recurrence early.

Software that turns raw sequencer output into a report of which mutations matter and which drugs they point to.

Sealed, robot-run machines that turn a patient's blood cells into a CAR-T product with far fewer hands, clean rooms, and mistakes.

Coffee does not cause cancer and is probably protective against liver and womb cancer. Very hot drinks of any kind may raise oesophageal cancer risk.

Knocking out every gene one at a time in cancer cells to find which ones they cannot live without.

Freezing cells at minus 150 degrees and shipping them in liquid-nitrogen 'dry shippers' with tracking, so a living drug arrives alive and matched to the right patient.

Running parts of a trial at home or locally, with telehealth, home nursing, and remote monitoring, so patients far from big centres can take part.

Magnified skin imaging and whole-body photo mapping, increasingly read by algorithms, to find melanoma early and avoid unnecessary biopsies.

Most people on cancer treatment take supplements, often without telling their team. Antioxidants, St John's wort, high-dose vitamins and some herbs can blunt chemotherapy or radiotherapy or interact with targeted drugs.

Scanning microscope slides and letting software measure things a pathologist cannot see, including predictions of who will benefit from a treatment.

Reading chemical tags on DNA that reveal a cell's identity, used to classify brain tumours and to detect cancer in blood.

Brief electric pulses applied to a tumour open pores in cell membranes so that a tiny dose of bleomycin or cisplatin floods in; used for skin metastases and, increasingly, for deep tumours.

Patients report symptoms weekly through an app or web form, and nurses respond to alerts. Randomised trials showed this simple system improved quality of life, cut emergency visits and, in one trial, extended survival by five months.

Apps and sensors that let patients report symptoms between visits, which in trials improved survival and cut emergency visits.

Nutrition support means tube feeding into the gut, or nutrition into a vein when the gut cannot be used. It is life-saving in the right patient, harmful or futile in the wrong one.

Using complementary approaches with real evidence, such as acupuncture for nausea and pain, yoga and mindfulness for anxiety and fatigue, alongside standard treatment, while steering patients away from unproven 'alternative' therapies that can shorten life.

Structured exercise during and after treatment, which the CHALLENGE trial showed improves survival in colon cancer.

Moderate exercise while on chemotherapy is safe and reduces fatigue, helps people finish their planned doses, and may protect the heart and nerves.

For young women with the earliest, low-grade endometrial cancers, progestin pills or a hormonal IUD can clear the cancer and allow pregnancy before a later hysterectomy.

Injecting a dye that makes tumour glow so the surgeon can see exactly where to cut.

Destroying tumours from outside the body with tightly focused sound waves, using either heat or microscopic bubbles.

Keeping cheap, essential chemotherapy drugs like cisplatin available; shortages in 2023 forced rationing in US hospitals.

Cloud systems where hospitals and researchers store and analyse genomic data securely at petabyte scale.

Geriatric assessment is a structured check of an older patient's fitness, memory, and support that predicts treatment tolerance better than age.

Yearly MRI or endoscopic ultrasound for people with inherited risk, which catches pancreatic cancers while they are still operable.

Testing millions or billions of chemical compounds against a cancer target automatically to find starting points for new drugs.

Washing the abdominal cavity with heated chemotherapy during surgery to kill microscopic peritoneal deposits.

Hyperthermia heats tumours to 40-43 °C to make radiation and chemotherapy work better.

Giving a single large dose of radiation directly to the tumour bed during surgery, with normal organs moved out of the way; used mainly in breast cancer as an alternative to weeks of external radiotherapy.

Irreversible electroporation uses short high-voltage pulses that punch permanent holes in tumour cells while sparing nearby vessels and ducts.

Isolating the blood supply of an arm or leg so that chemotherapy doses 15-20 times higher than the body could tolerate can be circulated through it, to save limbs with melanoma or sarcoma that would otherwise be amputated.

Laser interstitial thermal therapy guides a laser fibre through a small skull hole, monitored by real-time MRI, to heat and destroy deep brain tumours a surgeon could not safely reach.

Reading DNA in very long stretches, which reveals rearrangements and methylation that short-read machines miss.

Diets built around vegetables, wholegrains, legumes, nuts, fish and olive oil, with little red or processed meat, are linked with lower cancer risk and better survival after diagnosis. The evidence is strong for the pattern, weak for any single food.

A noradrenaline look-alike that neuroblastoma cells swallow: labelled with a small amount of radioactivity it shows the tumour on a scan; with a large amount it treats it.

The MR-linac is a radiation machine with an MRI inside it, so the plan is adjusted to where the tumour is that very day.

An ultra-sensitive blood test after surgery that detects leftover cancer months before a scan would.

Nuclear medicine hardware means the scanners themselves: PET/CT, SPECT/CT, and new total-body PET that images the whole body at once.

Screening for malnutrition, dietitian-led counselling, supplements and tube or intravenous feeding where indicated, plus treatment of cancer cachexia, the muscle-wasting syndrome that affects up to 80% of advanced patients.

BioNeMo is the software stack many biology foundation models are trained and served with.

Protecting the ability to have children before cancer treatment that damages eggs, sperm or the womb: sperm and egg or embryo freezing, ovarian tissue freezing, ovarian shielding and, for some breast cancers, temporary ovarian suppression.

Databases built from millions of real patient records, used to see how treatments work outside trials and to run studies without new trials.

Nutrition screening means weighing every patient, asking a few screening questions, and referring those at risk to a dietitian. It is simple, guideline-endorsed, and still not done routinely.

Robots and closed systems that prepare chemotherapy doses safely, protecting pharmacists from hazardous drugs and patients from errors.

Dyes that glow under special light, so surgeons can see tumour edges and nerves in the operating theatre.

Patient-derived organoids are miniature 3D versions of a patient's tumour grown in the lab.

A patient-derived xenograft is a patient's tumour grown in a mouse, used to test drugs before they reach people.

Making the microgram-potent toxins inside ADCs, in facilities built so a speck of dust cannot harm a worker.

PET combined with MRI instead of CT, giving biology plus the best soft-tissue detail, at lower radiation dose.

Plasmid DNA and mRNA raw materials are the DNA templates and enzymes behind viral vectors and mRNA vaccines. They are invisible to patients but decisive for supply.

Small-cell lung cancer spreads to the brain so often that doctors used to irradiate the whole brain pre-emptively. Regular MRI scans are now challenging that practice.

Machines that measure thousands of proteins at once from tissue or blood, used to find drug targets and early-detection markers.

Radiation using protons, which stop inside the tumour instead of passing through, so tissue behind it gets no dose.

Psycho-oncology recognises and treats the anxiety, depression, fear of recurrence and existential distress that affect a third of people with cancer, using screening, psychotherapy adapted to cancer, and medication.

Millions of tiny radioactive glass or resin beads are injected into the liver artery, lodging in the tumour and irradiating it from within.

Processed meat (bacon, ham, sausages) definitely causes bowel cancer; red meat probably does. The risk per person is modest, but because so many people eat it, the population impact is large.

Removing the fallopian tubes, where most ovarian cancer starts, during other pelvic surgery or in women at inherited risk.

Measuring which genes a tumour is actively using, which reveals its subtype and finds gene fusions.

A robot-guided flexible scope that reaches small lung nodules through the airways to biopsy them without a needle through the chest wall.

A cold cap worn during chemotherapy that reduces hair loss by narrowing blood vessels in the scalp.

Site-specific conjugation and linker chemistry decide exactly where and how many payloads attach to the antibody, which determines how safe and effective an ADC is.

Stopping smoking after a cancer diagnosis improves survival, reduces treatment complications and second cancers, and is the single most effective supportive intervention that oncology services still routinely fail to deliver.

For years women with breast cancer were told to avoid soy because it contains plant oestrogens. Large studies show moderate soy food intake is safe and may slightly reduce recurrence, including on tamoxifen.

Structural biology infrastructure is the microscopes, X-ray sources, and prediction models that show what a cancer protein looks like so chemists can design a drug to fit it.

A supervised, coached exercise programme for three years after bowel cancer treatment cut recurrence and death in a large randomised trial. It is the first lifestyle intervention proven to work like an adjuvant drug.

Organised follow-up for the 18 million US and 50+ million global cancer survivors: watching for recurrence and second cancers, managing long-term side effects such as heart damage, infertility, neuropathy and fatigue, and helping people return to work and life.

Video visits, remote monitoring and home delivery of some cancer treatments expanded massively during COVID-19 and have stayed; they reduce travel burden, especially for rural patients, without evidence of worse outcomes.

Video visits, remote second opinions, and slides reviewed from afar, which let rural and low-resource patients reach specialists.

Where the radioactive atoms for imaging and therapy actually come from: ageing reactors, new accelerators, and a scramble for actinium.

Removing throat tumours through the mouth with a robot instead of splitting the jaw, allowing many patients to avoid or reduce radiation.

Producing the engineered viruses that carry a CAR gene into T cells. Viral vector manufacturing is a long-standing bottleneck for cell and gene therapy.

Whole-body MRI is an MRI of the entire body without radiation, used to find spread in myeloma and to screen people with high inherited cancer risk.

Reading all the genes (exome) or the entire DNA (genome) of a tumour, rather than a chosen panel.

The scanners that turn glass slides into gigapixel images, and the software that stores and serves them, without which pathology AI cannot run.

Using machine learning to pick targets, design molecules and antibodies, and predict which ADC will work.

Cell therapies made from healthy donors in advance, so patients do not have to wait for their own cells to be engineered.

Smelling cancer: measuring the trace chemicals a tumour puts into exhaled breath.

Vaccinating people who do not have cancer yet but are very likely to get it, against the antigens their future tumour will carry.

Tumours recruit nerves and use nerve signals to grow. Blocking that traffic, with beta-blockers or botulinum toxin, is being tested.

Giving the same drug at a different time of day, because the body clock changes how much damage it does and how well the immune system responds.

Bacteria that seek out the low-oxygen core of tumours, then manufacture a drug on the spot.

Transplanting gut bacteria from patients who responded to immunotherapy into those who did not. In small studies a minority of resistant melanomas started responding. Randomised trials are running.

Eating very little for a few days around each chemotherapy dose might protect normal cells and sensitise the tumour. Early trials are intriguing but small, and it is not something to try without a dietitian.

Sound waves plus microbubbles briefly open the brain's protective barrier so chemotherapy or antibodies can get to the tumour.

HER2 PET is a PET scan using radiolabelled trastuzumab or smaller HER2 binders to map HER2 across all metastases at once.

A harmless molecule that turns into a poison only where there is no oxygen, which in the body means inside a tumour.

PET scans built from radiolabelled antibodies or their fragments, to see any protein an antibody can reach, including immune cells inside tumours.

Treating one tumour so aggressively that the immune system learns to attack every other one, using the tumour itself as the vaccine.

Injecting the gene for a powerful immune cytokine into a tumour and using an electric pulse to push it into the cells, so the cytokine is made locally rather than flooding the body.

A ketogenic diet is a very-low-carbohydrate, high-fat diet that makes the body run on ketones. The idea is to starve brain tumours of glucose. It is safe and feasible for a few months, but no trial has shown it makes people live longer.

Deliberately treating a big tumour unevenly, with a lattice of very high dose peaks inside it, instead of a uniform dose.

Magnetic nanoparticle hyperthermia injects iron-oxide nanoparticles into a tumour and heats them from outside with an alternating magnetic field.

An ADC wearing a mask that only comes off inside the tumour, so it ignores the same protein on healthy tissue.

Removing an amino acid or nutrient that certain tumours cannot make for themselves, while normal cells can.

Changing the gut bacteria of a patient whose immunotherapy stopped working, in the hope of restarting the response.

Oligonucleotide therapeutics are short synthetic strands of genetic code that silence a specific cancer gene.

Organoid-guided therapy means routinely growing a piece of each patient's tumour and testing drugs on it before choosing, rather than relying on genetics alone.

A PET tracer that measures how much of the DNA repair enzyme PARP a tumour has, to predict response to PARP inhibitors.

Gold nanoshells that accumulate in a tumour and cook it when a near-infrared laser is shone on them.

Attaching a radioactive atom to an antibody, so an ADC's targeting is used to deliver radiation instead of chemotherapy.

Nanoparticles that turn ordinary radiotherapy X-rays into a much bigger dose exactly where they sit.

A drug that does nothing until ultrasound hits it, then kills the cells that took it up. Being tested in brain tumours because sound reaches where light cannot.

Drugs that trigger the cell's built-in 'virus alarm' inside tumours to summon immune cells.

Time-restricted eating means eating within a window of 8-12 hours a day and fasting overnight. It improves blood sugar and weight a little; whether it changes cancer risk or recurrence is unknown.

Giving the innate immune system a memory, so monocytes and NK cells respond harder the next time they meet a tumour.

AI compute platforms are the GPUs, model libraries, and cloud services that pathology, radiology, and drug-design AI run on.

Aidoc CARE is a single foundation model behind many FDA-cleared triage alerts in emergency radiology.

Making cell therapies from a healthy donor or stem-cell line in advance, so patients get an off-the-shelf product instead of waiting weeks.

Reads a million letters of DNA at once and predicts how a mutation changes gene regulation, splicing and chromatin.

Atlas is a pathology foundation model trained on 1.2 million slides from two of the world's largest hospitals.

A lab test that measures how close a leukaemia cell is to self-destructing, and which survival protein is holding it back, to predict response to venetoclax-type drugs.

Predicts the many shapes a protein moves between, not just one, thousands of times faster than simulation.

Open-source structure models that match AlphaFold 3, with Boltz-2 also predicting how strongly a drug binds.

Turns a cell's gene expression into a sentence so a normal language model can reason about it; a 27-billion-parameter version proposed a cancer immunotherapy idea that was confirmed in the lab.

CellFM is an 800-million-parameter single-cell model trained on 100 million human cells.

Structure and antibody-design models from Chai Discovery, with Chai-2 reporting high zero-shot antibody hit rates.

Generative chemistry platform behind the first AI-discovered drug to reach phase 2, plus oncology candidates.

A pathology model trained across 19 cancer types that predicts survival and mutations from slides.

A model pretrained on 148,000 CT scans to segment organs and triage findings.

A blood test that tracks lymphoma DNA far below what a PET scan can see, so doctors can tell early who is cured and who will relapse.

Patients who eat plenty of fibre and avoid probiotic pills seem to respond better to immunotherapy for melanoma, probably because fibre feeds the right gut bacteria. A proper trial is under way.

Using a model of what would have happened to a patient on standard treatment, so fewer people have to be randomised to it.

Models that predict how DNA sequence controls gene activity, used to interpret non-coding cancer mutations.

ESM3 is a generative protein model that designed a working fluorescent protein far from any natural sequence.

A DNA language model trained on 9.3 trillion bases that can flag cancer-causing BRCA1 variants without being told about them.

Training AI models across many hospitals without moving patient data, so the model learns from everyone while the data stay put.

Cancer treatment can bankrupt patients even with insurance. Financial navigation programmes screen for money problems and connect patients to assistance, insurance optimisation and legal help, and trials show they reduce distress and debt.

A model trained on millions of hospital records that forecasts a patient's next diagnoses.

Growing a patient's own cancer cells in a dish and testing drugs on them directly, instead of guessing from genetics.

GEARS is a graph model predicting the effect of gene knockouts; the perturbation benchmarks around it showed how hard the problem is.

The first widely used transformer trained on millions of single cells, able to predict which genes matter in a disease.

Uses text embeddings of gene descriptions from a general LLM to represent cells, and performs surprisingly well.

Seventy percent of cancer deaths occur in low- and middle-income countries, where radiotherapy machines, pathologists, essential medicines and palliative care are scarce. Global oncology works on affordable, adapted care and the systems to deliver it.

GLP-1 agonists, the new weight-loss injections, lower weight by 15-20%. Early observational data suggest fewer obesity-related cancers in people who take them, but no trial has yet tested cancer as an outcome.

An open 1.1-billion-parameter pathology model from a French startup, among the strongest on public benchmarks.

Hibou is a family of open pathology foundation models under a permissive licence.

Drinks enriched with arginine, omega-3 fats and nucleotides for a week before a big operation seem to reduce infections afterwards, though the trials are old and mostly industry-funded.

Google's medical versions of its Gemini models, able to reason over text, images, and long records.

Adaptations of Meta's Segment Anything model that outline tumours and organs on any scan with a click.

Merlin is a model trained on 15,000 CT scans with their reports that can find and describe hundreds of findings.

Midnight is a pathology model that matched the leaders while training on far fewer slides.

Reads a mammogram to estimate five-year breast cancer risk, consistently across races and devices.

A model that reads slides and clinical text together to predict who will respond to immunotherapy.

Building a trial around one patient, or letting one trial swap drugs in and out as evidence accumulates.

Challengers to Illumina promising cheaper genomes, which matters for making tumour sequencing routine.

Nicheformer is a model trained on both dissociated and spatial data so it learns how a cell's neighbourhood shapes it.

DNA language models trained on thousands of genomes for variant and regulatory prediction.

Very large AI models trained on millions of slides or scans that can be adapted to almost any diagnostic question.

Growing a patient's pancreatic tumour as mini-organs in a dish and testing chemotherapies on them to pick the regimen most likely to work.

A model trained on billions of cell microscopy images to read what a drug or gene knockout does to a cell.

Owkin's open pathology models trained on TCGA and its federated hospital network.

PathAI's compact pathology foundation model designed to run across many tasks and resolutions.

Making CAR-T cells at or near the hospital instead of shipping cells to a central factory and back.

Prehabilitation is a few weeks of structured exercise, nutrition and psychological preparation between diagnosis and surgery to make patients fitter for the operation and speed recovery.

Antibiotics in the weeks before immunotherapy are linked with worse outcomes, and shop-bought probiotics may not help and might hurt. Avoiding both where possible is a low-cost precaution.

Measuring the proteins in a tumour, which is what drugs actually hit, rather than the genes that encode them.

An open pathology model trained on 1.3 billion image tiles from a US health system, modelling whole slides at gigapixel scale.

An open generalist model that answers questions about 2D and 3D scans.

Lifting weights and eating enough protein is the only treatment shown to build muscle in people with cancer wasting, but most are too unwell to do it alone and the trials are small.

The tools that design entirely new proteins to bind a chosen target, now used for cancer binders and antibodies.

scFoundation is a 100-million-parameter model trained on 50 million cells, from China's BioMap.

A GPT-style model for single-cell data that predicts cell types, perturbation responses, and gene networks.

Reading the genes of each individual cell, and mapping where each cell sits in the tumour.

Half of people with cancer sleep badly, so sleep and body-clock interventions matter. Talking therapy for insomnia works well and is under-used; whether fixing sleep or body-clock disruption changes the cancer itself is unproven.

Spatial biology instruments are machines that map which genes and proteins are active in each part of a tumour slice.

Choosing treatment from a map of where each cell type sits in the tumour, not just from a list of its mutations.

Predicts how cells will respond to a drug or gene knockout, trained on over 100 million perturbed cells.

Predicts a person's six-year lung cancer risk from one low-dose CT, even when no nodule is visible.

Models trained on Tempus's paired genomic, pathology, imaging and outcome data to predict response and prognosis.

TITAN is a model that summarises a whole slide, not just tiles, and can write a draft pathology report.

CZI's open cross-species cell models and a reasoning model trained on them.

Diets high in industrially processed foods and sugary drinks are linked with more cancer, mainly through obesity but perhaps also through additives and packaging chemicals. Sugar itself does not 'feed' a tumour in the way social media claims.

Two open academic pathology models: UNI reads tissue images, CONCH links images with pathology text.

Universal Cell Embedding maps any cell from any species into one shared space without retraining.

A pathology foundation model trained on millions of slides that can detect cancer and predict biomarkers from an ordinary H&E slide.

An ADC payload neutraliser is an antibody given alongside an ADC that mops up the poison once it leaks into the bloodstream, so the ADC can hit the tumour with fewer side effects.

Upgraded CAR-T cells that also secrete immune boosters, resist exhaustion, or only fire when two signals are present.

Putting the cancer-seeking receptor on natural killer cells or macrophages instead of T cells, which could be safer and off-the-shelf.

Engineered immune cells delivered directly into the brain or spinal fluid. Some children with an incurable brainstem tumour have had striking, if temporary, responses.

Designing a protein from scratch on a computer to grip a chosen target, instead of finding one in an animal or a library.

An ADC that delivers a protein-destroying molecule instead of chemotherapy, hitting targets inside the cell that were previously unreachable.

A dual-payload ADC is an ADC carrying two different poisons at once, so the tumour cannot escape by becoming resistant to one.

Loading the tiny vesicles cells naturally use to talk to each other with a cancer drug, so the body treats the carrier as its own.

Delivering an entire dose in under a second, which in animals spares healthy tissue while still killing the tumour.

Destroying a tumour mechanically with sound, rather than heat, leaves the debris intact enough for the immune system to learn from it.

An immune-stimulating antibody conjugate (ISAC) is an ADC whose payload wakes up the immune system inside the tumour rather than poisoning the cell.

Instead of engineering T cells in a factory, an injection reprograms them inside the patient's body.

Cells or drugs that fire only when two conditions are true at once, so healthy tissue expressing just one of them is spared.

Molecular glues are small molecules that stick two proteins together so the cell destroys one of them. They are smaller and more drug-like than bifunctional degraders.

Rotating the proton beam continuously around the patient instead of firing from a few fixed angles, to spread the entrance dose and sharpen the target dose.

Adding a PARP or ATR inhibitor to a radioactive drug so the tumour cannot repair the damage the radiation causes.

RNA drugs that copy themselves inside the cell, or are made as a loop so they last longer. Both aim to get more protein from a smaller dose.

An experimental PET scan that shows whether a tumour carries the TROP2 protein, so doctors could pick the right ADC before giving it.

Actinium-225 releases four alpha particles as it decays, but the daughters escape and irradiate the kidneys and salivary glands. Nanocarriers try to hold them in place.

An ADC that carries a gene-silencing strand instead of a chemotherapy, so it can switch a protein off rather than poison the cell.

Radioactive atoms that spray very short-range electrons, lethal only if the atom sits on or inside the cell's DNA.

Using viruses that infect bacteria, not human cells, as programmable delivery shells for cancer drugs and vaccines.

Instead of attacking the cancer cell, engineering T cells to strip away the scaffolding and the suppressive immune cells that protect it.

Folded DNA machines that open only when they touch a tumour, releasing a payload or clotting the tumour's blood supply.

Programmable DNA-targeting therapeutics are an experimental idea: a drug that reads a cell's DNA, recognises a cancer-specific sequence, and kills only cells that carry it. Change the guide, and the same drug becomes a new drug.

Brighter, longer-lasting fluorescent particles and targeted microbubbles that make tumours visible during surgery or on an ultrasound scan.

Chemotherapy leaves behind zombie cells that will not divide but poison their neighbours. Senolytics aim to clear them.

Some tumours contain bacteria and fungi that shelter cancer cells and break down chemotherapy. Killing them may make treatment work.

Stiff, high-pressure tumours squeeze their own blood vessels shut, keeping drugs out. Softening them is a way in.

Using very fast electrons instead of photons or protons: a possible way to deliver FLASH-speed radiation to deep tumours from a compact machine.

Instead of testing blood every three months, sampling constantly, so a relapse is caught the week it starts.

Switching a gene off for good without changing the DNA sequence, by writing chemical marks onto it.

In vivo base and prime editing would rewrite a cancer's DNA letter by letter inside the body. It works in the liver for inherited disease; nobody has yet corrected a cancer this way in a person.

Scanners sensitive enough to image the whole body in seconds at a fraction of the radiation dose, which raises the question of whether healthy people should be scanned at all.

Pleurectomy and decortication are operations that strip the tumour-bearing lining from the lung and chest wall. They were long assumed to help; the MARS 2 trial showed they do not.