Targeted therapies, vaccines, and artificial intelligence: AI has helped oncology achieve an unprecedented breakthrough

Targeted therapy is no longer the only path toward precision cancer treatment. At the ASCO 2026 annual meeting in Chicago, researchers presented a wide range of promising advances in oncology. Although these approaches differ in how they work, they all share the same underlying principle: first identify a tumor's unique vulnerability, then design a treatment specifically to exploit it.

Personalized mRNA cancer vaccines

The word “vaccine” is usually associated with disease prevention, but in oncology it refers to a therapeutic treatment given to people who already have cancer. This approach is individualized and highly specific. Doctors first obtain a sample of the patient's tumor, analyze its mutations, and create a vaccine targeting molecular features that are unique to the cancer and absent from healthy cells. The vaccine then trains the immune system to recognize and attack the tumor.

One of the biggest announcements at ASCO 2026 was the five-year follow-up of the personalized mRNA vaccine Intismeran Autogene (mRNA-4157), developed by Moderna and Merck. In patients with high-risk melanoma, the vaccine can be combined with the immunotherapy pembrolizumab to reduce the risk of recurrence or death by 49%, and maintain the benefit over five years of follow-up. The vaccine is now being evaluated in large Phase III clinical trials for melanoma, lung cancer, and kidney cancer.

CAR-T therapy reaches solid tumors

CAR-T therapy uses a patient's own immune cells as treatment. Doctors collect immune cells from the patient, genetically engineer them in the laboratory so they can recognize cancer cells, and then infuse them back into the body. In effect, the treatment itself is a living drug. For many years, this approach proved highly effective against blood cancers but was largely unsuccessful against solid tumors.

On June 24, 2026, China's National Medical Products Administration approved Satricel, developed by CARsgen, for the treatment of gastric cancer, making it the world's first CAR-T therapy approved for a solid tumor. In clinical trials, the treatment roughly doubled the length of time before the disease began progressing again. The approval demonstrated for the first time that engineered immune cells can be successfully adapted to target solid tumors that had previously resisted this form of therapy.

An antibody that delivers medicine directly to the tumor

This approach has a long technical name — an antibody-drug conjugate (ADC) — but the concept is straightforward. The antibody acts as a navigator, locating the cancer cell on its own. Attached to it is a drug payload that is released only after the antibody enters the cell, allowing the treatment to attack the tumor while largely sparing healthy tissues.

At ASCO 2026, researchers presented results for sacituzumabgovitecan. In patients with triple-negative breast cancer, a disease that is notoriously difficult to treat, the drug kept the cancer under control for significantly longer than standard chemotherapy: about 11 months versus 8 months when used in combination with immunotherapy. Another experimental drug, Izabren, the world's first dual-target “navigator” directed at both EGFR and HER3, produced responses in nearly half of patients with lung cancer.

Striking the RAS target once considered “undruggable”

Mutations in the RAS gene are found in many types of cancer, yet for decades researchers were unable to develop drugs capable of targeting them. The protein was widely regarded as “undruggable.” Daraxonrasib, discussed above in the section on pancreatic cancer, is among the first drugs to overcome this obstacle. According to the study presented at ASCO 2026 and published in the New England Journal of Medicine, it marks the beginning of a new generation of pan-RAS inhibitors that can finally attack this long-elusive target. If these findings are confirmed in larger clinical trials, they could offer an effective treatment option to patients who previously had few, if any, therapeutic alternatives.

Detecting tumors through a blood test

To strike a tumor's weak point with precision, doctors first have to find it. That is why diagnosis has become just as important as selecting the right therapy. One of the fastest-growing advances in oncology is the liquid biopsy — a blood test that detects fragments of tumor DNA circulating in the bloodstream. These fragments can help doctors choose an appropriate targeted therapy and, in the future, may allow cancers to be detected before they become visible on medical imaging. At ASCO 2026, liquid biopsy emerged as one of the conference's central themes. Dozens of presentations explored evidence that the test can not only predict patient outcomes but also guide treatment decisions, helping physicians determine when therapy should be intensified — or, conversely, de-escalated. In one study, for example, measuring circulating tumor DNA at the end of lymphoma treatment predicted relapse more accurately than conventional PET/CT imaging.

Vaccines, engineered immune cells, antibody “navigators,” and molecules designed with the help of artificial intelligence may seem like a diverse collection of technologies. Yet they all follow the same principle as lorlatinib and daraxonrasib: identify the tumor's specific vulnerability and attack it with precision. Only the method of attack differs.

The 2026 ASCO meeting revealed a wealth of new ways to do exactly that. Participants noted that the conference was among the most practice-changing in recent years, with an unusually large number of presentations reporting results that have the potential to reshape the standards of cancer care.