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Oncology
21st Nov, 2025
The Lancet
The new 2025 edition of the Atlas of Palliative Care in Africa reveals a continent where palliative care services remain underdeveloped and essential medicines are scarce, with poor integration into health systems. Moreover, insufficient training is constraining Africa's ability to address serious health-related suffering (SHS), which is affecting an estimated 17·6 million people per year, driven by a rapidly rising burden of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) and ageing populations.
A new US$50 million Technical Assistance Facility (TAF) for non-communicable diseases (NCDs) and women's cancers will begin by supporting the elimination of cervical cancer in Indonesia. The initiative was launched by the Women's Health and Economic Empowerment Network (WHEN) and the Elimination Partnership in the Indo-Pacific for Cervical Cancer (EPICC) on Sept 24, 2025, in New York, NY, USA, at the sidelines of the UN General Assembly. “Cervical cancer elimination is a ‘best buy’ in NCD control.
The UK National Health Service (NHS) is to construct and rollout a pioneering new cloud computer system that will allow artificial intelligence (AI) tools to be tested on an unprecedented scale across the NHS by cutting waste, duplication, and time needed to complete clinical trials, with a central aim to boost screening, including early diagnosis of cancer.
Non-communicable diseases (NCDs) now account for seven of the world's ten leading causes of death and kill 18 million people each year before age 70 years. WHO recently launched a new investment case urging countries to scale up proven, cost-effective interventions. The analysis, Saving Lives, Spending Less, estimates that implementing WHO's “best buys” in 176 countries would cost about US$3 per person annually. By 2030, the package could save more than 12 million lives, prevent 28 million heart attacks and strokes, add 150 million healthy life-years, and generate around US$1 trillion in economic benefits.
Dawson LA, Ringash J, Fairchild A, et al. Palliative radiotherapy versus best supportive care in patients with painful hepatic cancer (CCTG HE1): a multicentre, open-label, randomised, controlled, phase 3 study. Lancet Oncol 2024; 25: 1337–46—In this Article, in the last paragraph of the Results section, the proportion of patients who reported any grade 2 or worse adverse event 1–3 months after randomisation should have been eight (24%) of 33 patients in the radiotherapy plus best supportive care group.
Aggarwal A, Simcock R, Price P, et al. NHS cancer services and systems—ten pressure points a UK cancer control plan needs to address. Lancet Oncol 2024; 25: e363–73—In this Policy Review, the second sentence in paragraph 4 of the Pressure point 6 section should have said “six times” instead of “600 times”. This correction has been made to the online version as of Oct 27, 2025.
I read with interest, the Article by Yichen Zhang and colleagues,1 which presents an important retrospective evaluation of the evidential standards underpinning cancer drug approvals in China between 2017 and 2021. Although the study admirably highlights methodological concerns surrounding trial design and bias, I wish to raise two additional critical methodological shortcomings that warrant further scrutiny.
We congratulate Nicole Concin and colleagues with the effort put into the updated ESGO–ESTRO–ESP guidelines.1 Although we support the integration of oestrogen receptor status in the guideline, we wonder why progesterone receptor expression is not included. In our opinion, oestrogen receptor and progesterone receptor have additional prognostic and predictive value in endometrial cancer, and these receptors are cheap and well established biomarkers available worldwide for breast and endometrial cancer diagnosis.
In The Lancet Oncology, Louise Emmett and colleagues1 present an elegant prespecified substudy from the ENZA-p trial that shows that baseline prostate-specific membrane antigen (PSMA)-PET total tumour volume (PSMA-TTV) is not only prognostic for overall survival, but also predictive of benefit from adding [177Lu]Lu-PSMA-617 to enzalutamide as a first-line treatment in patients with high-risk, metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer. However, whole-body standardised uptake value (SUV) mean did not show predictive value in this combination setting.
In August, 2025, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) published a draft guidance on the assessment of overall survival in randomised cancer drug trials.1 In essence, the guidance states that overall survival and quality of life are the only clinical endpoints to confirm the benefit of any cancer therapies—ultimately, patients want longer and better lives as a trade-off for the toxic effects of treatment. However, in recent years the FDA has deprioritised the need to show an overall survival improvement from new cancer drugs, with several new cancer drugs receiving full approval on the basis of improvements in putative surrogate endpoints alone, often in the face of negative overall survival results.
Androgen receptor pathway inhibitors (ARPIs) in combination with androgen deprivation therapy (ADT) represent the foundation of treatment for both metastatic castration-sensitive prostate cancer (mCSPC) and metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer (mCRPC).1 In selected patients with mCSPC, the addition of six cycles of docetaxel further enhances overall survival outcomes.2 However, therapeutic resistance remains common and prostate cancer remains a substantial cause of cancer-related mortality.
In addition to next generation small molecule tyrosine-kinase inhibitors,1,2 large molecular weight antibody–drug conjugates (ADCs) have shown CNS-specific activity, penetrating a blood–brain barrier that is disrupted by local therapies, the presence of brain metastases, or both.3 The adoption of these CNS-penetrant systemic therapies to treat patients with active brain metastases is increasingly accepted in routine practice, despite little data from randomised trials.
Concurrent chemoradiotherapy followed by consolidation with durvalumab is the standard of care for patients with locally advanced non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) who are medically or surgically inoperable, have a good performance status, and do not have actionable EGFR mutations.1 In the PACIFIC trial, consolidation treatment with durvalumab for up to 12 months after platinum-based chemoradiotherapy showed a 5-year progression-free survival rate of 33·1% (95% CI 28·0–38·2) and 5-year overall survival rate of 42·9% (38·2–47·4).
In The Lancet Oncology, Daniella Black and colleagues1 report whole-genome sequencing (WGS) data of 2445 breast cancer tumours from a UK cohort (100 000 Genomes Project [100kGP]). As well as linking these data to clinical and mortality data, the authors externally validated their results in a Swedish cohort (SCAN-B) of 502 cases. By integrating driver mutations, mutational signatures, and structural variation (SV) burden, the authors show that, alongside a handful of drivers known from other tumour types, a single WGS assay could identify potentially actionable alterations in 656 (26·8%) of all 2445 breast cancer cases in the 100kGP cohort.
A side event held by the Bloomberg New Economy International Cancer Coalition and American Society of Clinical Oncology at the 2025 UN General Assembly in New York, New York, USA, saw the launch of the Global Cancer Financing Platform, marking a pivotal step in reshaping how the world funds cancer care. This gathering brought together international stakeholders from across governments, industry, philanthropy, and civil societies to explore innovative financing models for cancer care. One highlight was the potential for diaspora remittances.
Neurology
11th Mar, 2026
Microbe / Infectious Research
Rheumatology
The New England Journal of Medicine
