IIt’s wonderful to celebrate the slew of innovations in cancer treatment that we saw in the previous decade. Of all drug approvals from 2010 to 2018, 27% were cancer therapies, compared with 4% in the 1980s. Yet cancer remains the leading cause of death globally, accounting for nearly 10 million deaths in 2020. (In comparison, COVID-19 killed about 3 million people in 2020.) There’s much work left to do.

Much of cancer treatment involves some combination of surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. The excitement in the past decade centers on a different family of treatments called immunotherapies, which are designed to help the immune system ferret out and obliterate cancer.

In this report, you’ll encounter start-ups boosting these therapies’ activity with microbes, discovering new targets to broaden the universe of cancers that might respond to treatment, moving toward less costly therapies that are not made from a patient’s own cells, and much more.

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