what the latest discoveries suggest

Each year, this vast congress, which brings together 40,000 specialists in Chicago (United States) from May 30 to June 4, 2025, aims to take stock of the most promising clinical studies. During this abundant edition, a learned dose of optimism reigned, perhaps impaired, but real. A good sign, since most of the therapies that we will offer tomorrow in the hospital services of oncology are first presented during this reference congress.

This time, convincing studies have shown the new benefits obtained by immunotherapy treatments, introduced at the end of the 19th century to fight cancer, and particularly developed for ten years. These therapies consist in stimulating the patient’s immune system to attack the tumor.

A study by the Gustave-Roussy Institute, presented in the prestigious plenary session revealed the relevance of administering them from the start of the treatment of certain ENT cancers, the most frequent, at high risk of relapse. “It significantly improves the rate of survival without disease,” says Dr. Yungan Tao, coordinator of the study. No significant progress has been recorded in the treatment of this pathology over the past twenty years.

Personalized vaccines and biomarkers: promising tracks against aggressive cancers

Research also advances on anti-cancer vaccines. There is no question here of being vaccinated preventively, as for the flu. The principle of “vaccinotherapy” consists in teaching the immune system to recognize, then destroy cancer cells by introducing antigens* with the characteristics of the patient’s tumor.

“Suffice to say tailor -made medicine,” said Professor Steven Le Gouill, director of the hospital ensemble at the Institut Curie. Two studies, presented at the Congress by doctors of the Curie Institute, show promising results for the very first individualized vaccine in ENT cancers and against that of the pancreas, bad prognosis.

The ASCO Congress has also grown a lot of good news on circulating biomarkers, these molecules abnormally expressed by cancer cells. A pioneering study, that Prof. François-Clément Bidart, medical oncologist at the Institut Curie, coordinated worldwide, has caused a stir. It demonstrates, in cancers of the hormone -dependent breast and producing metastases, the benefit of a new hormone therapy, thanks to a monitoring of circulating tumor DNA. In other words, a simple blood analysis would make it possible to very early detect mutations in resistance to treatment “which appear in 40 % of patients”, underlines Pr Bidart. “Doctors will be able to anticipate them and adapt the treatments accordingly”. One more hope.

* Substance foreign to the body which produces antibodies which react to its presence