It seems like new cancer breakthroughs are being reported every week. You’ve hopefully already heard of daraxonrasib, the pancreatic cancer drug, that has finally made pancreatic cancer treatable. But many more breakthroughs were presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology’s annual conference over the past week.

I wrote about some of my highlights in a new post, below.

Whatʼs behind so much progress?

Part of it is the continued rise of precision drugs, targeted towards tumours with certain genetic markers. Although the genomic revolution began a few decades ago, the fruits of that progress can take a long time to make it through the pipeline.

Another part is advances in structural chemistry. Both have helped not only in identifying better targets, but also engineering for basic research, like producing mutant KRAS proteins to find new druggable pockets, and applied research for new platforms, like mRNA vaccines.

Such progress feels like an odd contrast with cuts to science funding weʼre seeing, including to the National Cancer Institute.

But itʼs worth remembering that the breakthroughs we see today are a lagging indicator of inputs into the pipeline: they reflect choices people made in the past. Weʼll only be able to see the gaps created by these rounds of cuts in retrospect, years from now. And weʼll realise that technology isnʼt always the reason for progress; sometimes, itʼs the funding, institutions and incentives we create.