Atlas · 771 technologies

Cancer technologies A to Z

Platforms and methods behind modern oncology, from liquid biopsy to cell-therapy manufacturing.

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A

A changed face and voice: body image after head and neck cancer treatmentemerging: Head and neck cancer treatment changes the part of the body a person cannot cover, and the functions, speech and eating, that social life is built on. There is no pooled prevalence figure for body image distress in this group: the first systematic review of...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Accelerator-based BNCT systems (NeuCure, nuBeam, NeuPex)approved: Boron neutron capture therapy used to need a nuclear reactor. These hospital-sized accelerators make the neutron beam instead, and in 2020 Japan approved the first one, with its boron drug, for head and neck cancers that have come back or cannot be removed.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Actinium-225 supply: thorium stocks, accelerators and radium targetsphase-3: Actinium-225 is the alpha-emitting atom behind the most promising next wave of radioligand therapies, and there is not enough of it. Almost all of it used to come from one decaying stock of thorium in a US national laboratory. New routes use accelerators an...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Active surveillancestandard-of-care: For low-risk prostate cancer, monitoring with PSA, MRI, and repeat biopsy instead of treating, because most such cancers never cause harm.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Active surveillance of papillary microcarcinomaestablished: Active surveillance watches papillary thyroid cancers of 1 cm or less with ultrasound every 6 to 12 months instead of operating, because about 90% stay stable over a decade and delayed surgery works as well when needed. It is not suitable for tumours next t...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Acupuncture and acupressure for chemotherapy nauseaestablished: Stimulating the P6 point on the inner wrist, with needles, electrical stimulation or a pressure band, adds a small further reduction in chemotherapy vomiting on top of modern anti-sickness drugs. It is safe and cheap, and guidelines say it can be offered.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Acupuncture for aromatase-inhibitor joint painestablished: Joint pain and stiffness are the main reason women stop aromatase-inhibitor tablets early. In a large randomised trial, twelve weeks of acupuncture reduced that pain more than sham needling or no treatment, and the benefit lasted after the sessions ended.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Acupuncture for chemotherapy-induced neuropathyphase-2: Numb, tingling or painful hands and feet after taxanes, platinum or bortezomib have no proven preventive treatment. Small trials suggest acupuncture may ease the symptoms, but they are too small and inconsistent to be sure, so it is an option to try inside...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Acupuncture for dry mouth after head and neck radiotherapyemerging: Radiotherapy to the head and neck can permanently dry the mouth. A randomised trial in the United States and China found that acupuncture given during radiotherapy reduced dry mouth a year later compared with standard care, an effect that needs confirming.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Acupuncture for hot flushes on endocrine therapyemerging: Hot flushes on tamoxifen or aromatase inhibitors are common and hormone replacement is off the table. Acupuncture reduced flushes in several randomised trials, in one about as well as the drug gabapentin and with fewer side effects, though sham-controlled r...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Adaptive radiotherapy (online replanning)emerging: Re-shaping the treatment plan to the anatomy of the day, using the images taken on the treatment couch, so the dose follows a shrinking tumour or a moving bladder.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Adaptive therapy (evolution-based dosing)emerging: Instead of hitting a tumour as hard as possible, adaptive therapy gives just enough drug to keep it in check and stops when it shrinks, so drug-sensitive cells survive to compete with resistant ones. A pilot trial in prostate cancer roughly doubled the time...Open in Atlas onco.cc
ADC bioconjugation manufacturing (CDMOs)established: ADC bioconjugation manufacturing joins a payload so toxic it needs the top containment class (OEB 5) to an antibody, then checks drug-to-antibody ratio and free payload. Capacity sits with a handful of contractors such as Lonza, WuXi XDC and Samsung Biologi...Open in Atlas onco.cc
ADC payload neutralisersphase-1: An ADC payload neutraliser is an antibody given alongside an ADC that mops up the poison once it leaks into the bloodstream, so the ADC can hit the tumour with fewer side effects.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Adolescents and young adults: a group with its own cancers, its own gap and its own needsestablished: People diagnosed between 15 and 39 get different cancers from children and from older adults, and for years their survival improved more slowly than either. Since 2000 that has changed: five-year survival gains for this group have paralleled those of childh...Open in Atlas onco.cc
AFP, hCG and LDH in germ cell tumours (IGCCCG risk groups)standard-of-care: In testicular and other germ cell cancers three blood tests, AFP, beta-hCG and LDH, are part of the staging itself: their levels after surgery sort patients into good, intermediate and poor risk groups that fix how many cycles of chemotherapy they get, and...Open in Atlas onco.cc
After a transplant or cell therapy: what to ask forstandard-of-care: The things worth asking a transplant team for, in one place: who follows you up and for how long, which screens are due at which year, what immunisations you need and when, and who to ring when something changes.Open in Atlas onco.cc
After ruxolitinib: belumosudil, axatilimab and ibrutinib in chronic GvHDapproved: Three more drugs are licensed for chronic GvHD that has not responded to earlier treatment. Their response rates look high, between half and three quarters, but they come from trials with no comparison group. Ibrutinib is the cautionary case: it looked good...Open in Atlas onco.cc
After treatment in Australia: a stated model of survivorship careestablished: Australia published a national model setting out what survivorship care should contain: stratified pathways by need, a treatment summary and care plan, a focus on wellness and prevention as well as surveillance, and timely access without unnecessary appoint...Open in Atlas onco.cc
After treatment in Germany: a rehabilitation entitlement, not a leafletstandard-of-care: Germany does something no English-speaking country does: it funds a three-week structured rehabilitation stay after cancer treatment as an entitlement, inpatient or full-day outpatient, through the pension insurance system. Retired people and some non-insur...Open in Atlas onco.cc
After treatment in low and middle income countries: mostly nothingemerging: Most people in the world who survive cancer are offered no survivorship care at all. Specialist centres are rare, follow-up is limited, late effects are poorly documented, and the household pays. This is the largest gap in recovery care anywhere, and the on...Open in Atlas onco.cc
After treatment in the Nordic countries: rehabilitation written into the pathwayestablished: Denmark, Norway and Sweden build rehabilitation and a named contact person into the national cancer pathway rather than leaving them to be requested afterwards. Even in tax-funded systems designed around need, the published work finds that socially disadvan...Open in Atlas onco.cc
After treatment in the UK: personalised care, and follow-up you lead yourselfstandard-of-care: In England the offer has four named parts: an assessment of what you need and a plan written with you, information and support about living well, a summary of your treatment sent to you and your GP, and a review with your GP. Follow-up is increasingly not a...Open in Atlas onco.cc
After treatment in the United States: the survivorship care plan, and what the trial foundestablished: The United States answer to life after treatment was a written survivorship care plan, made an accreditation requirement for cancer centres. The randomised trial of it found no benefit on any patient-reported outcome, and the requirement was later replaced...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Agent-based and multicellular simulationsemerging: Instead of equations for average behaviour, agent-based models simulate every cell as an individual with rules for dividing, moving, dying and signalling, producing virtual tumours in which immune attack, drug delivery and evolution can be watched and tested.Open in Atlas onco.cc
AI auto-contouring and adaptive planningestablished: Software that draws organs and tumours on scans automatically, saving hours per patient and making daily plan adaptation practical.Open in Atlas onco.cc
AI compute and model platforms for oncologyemerging: AI compute platforms are the GPUs, model libraries, and cloud services that pathology, radiology, and drug-design AI run on.Open in Atlas onco.cc
AI in radiologyestablished: Software that reads scans alongside radiologists, catching cancers earlier and predicting who is at risk.Open in Atlas onco.cc
AI polyp detection in colonoscopyapproved: Real-time software that highlights polyps on the colonoscopy screen, helping doctors find more of the growths that could become bowel cancer.Open in Atlas onco.cc
AI scoring of biomarkers and grade on pathology slidesapproved: Software that reads digitised biopsy slides to detect cancer, grade it, and score biomarkers such as HER2, PD-L1 and Ki-67 more consistently than the eye alone.Open in Atlas onco.cc
AI trial matching & clinical decision supportestablished: Software, increasingly LLM-based, that reads a patient's record and finds trials or guideline options they qualify for.Open in Atlas onco.cc
AI-assisted mammography screeningapproved: Software that reads screening mammograms alongside or before radiologists, catching more cancers and cutting the reading workload in large trials.Open in Atlas onco.cc
AI-driven drug & target discoveryphase-2: Using machine learning to pick targets, design molecules and antibodies, and predict which ADC will work.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Aidoc CARE (clinical radiology foundation model)emerging: Aidoc CARE is one radiology foundation model, pretrained on CT scans without labels, whose task-specific heads have each been FDA-cleared to flag urgent findings in emergency scans so radiologists read those first. Its oncology relevance is indirect, catchi...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Alcohol reduction, pricing and cancer warning labelsestablished: Alcohol causes at least seven cancers and there is no safe threshold. Price, availability and cancer warning labels are the tools that work; most people still do not know alcohol causes cancer.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Allogeneic (off-the-shelf) cell therapyphase-2: Cell therapies made from healthy donors in advance, so patients do not have to wait for their own cells to be engineered.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Allogeneic cell banks: one donor, hundreds of dosesphase-2: Instead of making CAR-T cells from each patient, take T cells from a healthy donor or from a stem cell line, edit them so the patient's body will not fight them, grow a huge batch and freeze it into hundreds of doses that sit on a shelf.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Allogeneic donor and iPSC master cell banksemerging: Making cell therapies from a healthy donor or stem-cell line in advance, so patients get an off-the-shelf product instead of waiting weeks.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Allogeneic stem cell transplantationstandard-of-care: Allogeneic stem cell transplantation replaces a patient's blood system with a donor's after conditioning chemotherapy, so donor immune cells hunt down leukaemia left behind. It remains the only cure for adverse-risk acute myeloid leukaemia, high-risk acute...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Alpha-emitter nanogenerators and daughter trappingpreclinical: Actinium-225 releases four alpha particles as it decays, but the daughters escape and irradiate the kidneys and salivary glands. Nanocarriers try to hold them in place.Open in Atlas onco.cc
AlphaFold 3established: Predicts the 3D shape of proteins together with DNA, RNA, small molecules and antibodies, the starting point for much modern drug design.Open in Atlas onco.cc
AlphaGenomeemerging: Reads a million letters of DNA at once and predicts how a mutation changes gene regulation, splicing and chromatin.Open in Atlas onco.cc
AlphaMissenseestablished: Scored all 71 million possible single-letter protein changes in humans as likely harmful or benign.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Alternative medicine used instead of standard treatmentnegative: Complementary approaches used alongside treatment can help with symptoms. Choosing an alternative therapy instead of surgery, chemotherapy, radiotherapy or hormone therapy is a different decision: in a national US database, people who did so were two and a...Open in Atlas onco.cc
American ginseng for cancer-related fatiguephase-2: In a randomised placebo-controlled trial of 364 people, eight weeks of Wisconsin American ginseng modestly improved cancer-related fatigue, mainly in those still on treatment. The 2024 fatigue guideline says it may be offered during treatment; quality of th...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Androgen deprivation & AR pathway inhibitorsstandard-of-care: Androgen deprivation lowers testosterone or blocks its receptor, and has been the foundation of prostate cancer treatment since 1941 (Nobel Prize 1966).Open in Atlas onco.cc
Angiogenesis and vascular normalisation modelsemerging: Models of how tumours recruit blood vessels, and of Rakesh Jain's idea that anti-angiogenic drugs at the right dose normalise rather than destroy those vessels, improving drug and oxygen delivery for a window of days.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Anti-angiogenic therapystandard-of-care: Anti-angiogenic therapy cuts off the tumour's blood supply; it is now mostly used to help immunotherapy work better.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Antiandrogens for hair: spironolactone, finasteride, dutasterideemerging: Because hair thinning on endocrine therapy follows the pattern of androgenetic alopecia, the drugs used for that pattern are sometimes added. The evidence in cancer survivors cannot separate them from minoxidil, the one guideline that addresses spironolacto...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Antibody manufacturing (CHO bioprocessing)standard-of-care: Antibody manufacturing means growing antibody drugs like pembrolizumab or trastuzumab in vats of engineered hamster cells, then purifying them. It is the industrial base for most modern cancer drugs.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Antibody-drug conjugate (ADC)approved: An antibody-drug conjugate is an antibody that homes to a protein on the tumour cell, is swallowed, and releases a chemotherapy payload inside it. That widens chemotherapy's safe dose window about a hundredfold, which is why payloads too toxic to give alone...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Antibody-oligonucleotide conjugatespreclinical: An ADC that carries a gene-silencing strand instead of a chemotherapy, so it can switch a protein off rather than poison the cell.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Antiemetics for chemotherapy-induced nausea and vomitingstandard-of-care: The drugs that stopped chemotherapy from meaning days of vomiting: 5-HT3 blockers (ondansetron, palonosetron), NK1 blockers (aprepitant), dexamethasone and olanzapine, given by the emetic risk of each regimen.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Antineoplastons (Burzynski clinic)negative: Antineoplastons are peptide fractions first isolated from urine and given at one private clinic in Texas for nearly fifty years, mostly to children with brain tumours. Despite dozens of registered trials, none has been published in full, no independent grou...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Anxiety after cancer, in survivors and in their partnersestablished: Two or more years after diagnosis, anxiety is the mood problem that stays raised: 17.9 per cent of 48,964 people against 13.9 per cent of 226,467 who had not had cancer, a relative risk of 1.27. Depression at that distance is not raised. Where both members...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Anxiety around scans, and what the evidence says about how often to scanestablished: Anxiety around a scan has been measured in 57 studies using 81 different instruments, which is why reported rates run from 13 to 83 per cent; moderate to severe anxiety was reported by 4 to 28 per cent. Scanning more often does not lengthen life in breast c...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Apheresis and starting-material collectionstandard-of-care: Apheresis is collecting a patient's white blood cells through a machine over several hours. Every autologous CAR-T begins here, and the quality of these cells shapes the final product.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Armoured, logic-gated & next-gen CARsphase-1: Upgraded CAR-T cells that also secrete immune boosters, resist exhaustion, or only fire when two signals are present.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Aromatherapyemerging: Scented essential oils, alone or with massage, are pleasant and may briefly ease anxiety or nausea, but the trials are small and a Cochrane review found no reliable evidence that adding aromatherapy to massage does anything more than massage alone.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Asking people how they are, every week, as a treatment in its own rightestablished: Several randomised trials tested asking patients to report symptoms every week, with a nurse alerted when something is bad or getting worse. It reliably improves how people feel and function and cuts emergency visits. Whether it lengthens life did not hold...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Aspirin for cancer prevention and adjuvant therapyphase-3: Daily low-dose aspirin lowers bowel cancer risk in people with Lynch syndrome and appears to cut recurrence in bowel cancers with a particular mutation. In healthy older people it caused more harm than good.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Astatine-211 alpha therapyphase-1: A rare alpha-emitting halogen that can be attached to antibodies and small molecules like iodine, tested in leukaemia conditioning and brain and ovarian cancer.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Atlas (Aignostics, Mayo Clinic, Charité)emerging: Atlas is a pathology foundation model trained on 1.2 million slides from two of the world's largest hospitals.Open in Atlas onco.cc
ATR and CHK1 inhibitorsphase-2: Drugs that disable the checkpoint cancer cells use to pause and repair DNA under replication stress, pushing tumours with faulty DNA repair into collapse.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Auger-electron therapypreclinical: Auger-electron therapy uses radioactive atoms such as iodine-125 or terbium-161 that release cascades of low-energy electrons travelling only nanometres to micrometres, so they kill a cell only if the atom sits on or inside its DNA and spare the neighbours....Open in Atlas onco.cc
Autologous CAR-T manufacturing, batch by batchstandard-of-care: Each CAR-T dose is a separate factory run for one patient: collect their T cells, activate them, add the CAR gene with a virus, grow them for a week or two, freeze, test and ship them back. The steps, the failure points and the waiting list are all here.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Autologous stem cell transplant (high-dose therapy)standard-of-care: Autologous stem cell transplant collects the patient's own blood-forming stem cells, gives melphalan or another chemotherapy at a dose that would otherwise destroy the marrow, then returns the cells to rebuild it. It is standard consolidation in myeloma and...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Ayurvedic medicine and cancerconcept: Ayurveda, the traditional medicine of India, offers diet, yoga, herbs and mineral preparations. Yoga has good evidence in its own right; the herbal and mineral remedies have not been shown to treat cancer, and a fifth of products sold online contained lead,...Open in Atlas onco.cc

B

B-cell aplasia and low antibodies after CAR-T and bispecifics, and immunoglobulin replacementstandard-of-care: Treatments aimed at a protein on B cells cannot tell a cancerous B cell from a healthy one, so they remove both, antibody levels fall and infections become more frequent. The fix is to give the antibodies back every few weeks. In one myeloma study, serious...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Bacterial vector cancer vaccinesphase-2: Weakened bacteria such as Listeria engineered to carry tumour antigens, using the body's strong response to infection to train T cells against cancer.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Bacteriophage-based tumour deliverypreclinical: Bacteriophage delivery uses viruses that infect bacteria, not human cells, as engineered shells whose coat proteins display tumour-homing peptides or antigens and carry drugs or vaccines. They are cheap and cannot replicate in people, but the work is precli...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Balance, dizziness and falls after cancer treatmentemerging: Surgery for a vestibular schwannoma removes the balance nerve on one side, and the brain has to learn to work without it. Vestibular rehabilitation is the physiotherapy that teaches it, and a systematic review of 23 studies graded every outcome as very low...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Bariatric surgery and cancer incidenceestablished: People with severe obesity who have weight-loss surgery develop about a third fewer cancers over the following decade, especially womb and other hormone-related cancers, than similar people who do not.Open in Atlas onco.cc
BCG manufacturing and the bladder cancer BCG shortagestandard-of-care: BCG, the century-old tuberculosis vaccine, is the best treatment for early bladder cancer, but it is a live bacterium that grows slowly and only one company makes it for the United States. Since 2019 urologists have been splitting doses and rationing courses.Open in Atlas onco.cc
BCL-2 inhibitorsapproved: Drugs that switch off BCL-2, the protein that lets cancer cells refuse to die; venetoclax transformed treatment of chronic lymphocytic leukaemia and acute myeloid leukaemia.Open in Atlas onco.cc
BH3 profiling (functional apoptosis testing)emerging: A lab test that measures how close a leukaemia cell is to self-destructing, and which survival protein is holding it back, to predict response to venetoclax-type drugs.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Biliary stenting and drainagestandard-of-care: A small tube placed by endoscope or through the skin reopens a blocked bile duct, relieving jaundice so chemotherapy can be given.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Bimatoprost for eyelash and eyebrow regrowthapproved: Eyelashes and eyebrows often fall out with chemotherapy and can be slow to return. Bimatoprost, a glaucoma eye drop approved for thin lashes, applied along the lash line each night increased lash length and thickness in a randomised trial that included peop...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Biobanking and tissue procurementestablished: Freezers full of consented tumour samples with matched clinical data, which every biomarker and drug programme depends on.Open in Atlas onco.cc
BioEmu (Microsoft)emerging: BioEmu is a Microsoft generative diffusion model that predicts the range of shapes a protein moves between, not one static structure, thousands of times faster than molecular dynamics simulation. For cancer drug discovery that can reveal transient pockets,...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Biology-guided radiotherapy (RefleXion X1, SCINTIX)emerging: A radiotherapy machine with PET detectors built in: the tumour's own radioactive tracer signal tells the beam where to fire, hundreds of times a second, so moving tumours and several metastases can be tracked and treated without external markers.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Biosimilar manufacturing and comparabilitystandard-of-care: A biosimilar is a copy of an antibody drug made by a different company in different cells. It cannot be identical, so the maker must prove the copy behaves the same in the laboratory and in patients. Biosimilars of trastuzumab, bevacizumab and rituximab hav...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Bispecific ADCphase-3: A bispecific ADC is an ADC whose antibody grabs two different proteins on the cancer cell, so it sticks better to tumour and less to healthy tissue.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Bispecific antibodiesapproved: A bispecific antibody is one antibody with two different grabbing arms, so it can block two targets at once or pull an immune cell onto a cancer cell.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Black salve and other escharotic pastesnegative: Black salve is a corrosive paste containing bloodroot and zinc chloride sold online to 'draw out' skin cancers. It burns whatever it touches, leaves disfiguring scars, does not reliably remove the cancer, and has let melanomas spread while people believed t...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Bladder EpiCheck urine methylation testapproved: A urine test from the Israeli company Nucleix that reads fifteen DNA methylation markers and gives a score for bladder cancer recurrence, aimed at sparing patients under surveillance some of their camera examinations.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Blood counts that do not come back after CAR-T: ICAHTestablished: After CAR-T the blood counts often take much longer to recover than after ordinary chemotherapy, and in some people they dip again weeks later after appearing to have recovered. Since 2023 this has had a name, ICAHT, and an agreed grading system, which matt...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Blood-level monitoring of oral targeted cancer drugsemerging: Cancer tablets such as kinase inhibitors are given at one dose for everyone, though the amount in the blood differs widely between people. A Dutch study of 600 patients measured trough levels and adjusted when they were low, cutting the share of people with...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Body image after cancer treatment: how it is measured, what drives it, and what helpsestablished: Body image has a validated ten-item questionnaire built for cancer trials and tested in 682 women with breast cancer. It discriminates reliably between people who had a mastectomy and those who had breast-conserving surgery, and the scores do not track age...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Body-surface-area dosingestablished: Chemotherapy doses are usually written per square metre of body surface, a convention from 1958 that scales drug clearance between species and people; it is imprecise, and for many newer drugs flat or weight-based doses have replaced it.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Boltz-1 / Boltz-2 (MIT, open)emerging: Open-source structure models that match AlphaFold 3, with Boltz-2 also predicting how strongly a drug binds.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Bone after childhood cancer: peak bone mass, osteonecrosis and what rebuildsestablished: A child treated during the years in which bone is laid down may never reach the peak bone mass they would have had, which is a different problem from an adult losing bone already built. Thirty per cent of adult survivors of childhood leukaemia had low bone...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Bone loss caused by cancer treatment, and what rebuilds itstandard-of-care: Hormone treatments, chemotherapy that stops the ovaries and long courses of steroids all thin the bones, fast enough to measure within a year. Some of it comes back when the treatment stops, and the drugs that prevent fracture while it is going on are well...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Bone, eyes, kidneys and lungs after transplantestablished: Four problems that turn up years later and are easy to miss because each belongs to a different specialty: bone that thins or, less often, dies at the hip; cataract, which is common after total body irradiation and is fixed by an operation; kidney function...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Bone-modifying agents (bisphosphonates, denosumab)standard-of-care: Zoledronic acid and denosumab reduce fractures, spinal cord compression and bone pain from bone metastases and myeloma, prevent treatment-induced bone loss, and in postmenopausal breast cancer modestly reduce recurrence in bone.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Boron neutron capture therapyapproved: In boron neutron capture therapy a boron drug accumulates in tumour cells, then a neutron beam makes only those cells explode from inside.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Bowel function after pelvic radiotherapyestablished: New bowel symptoms after radiotherapy to the prostate, cervix, womb, bladder or rectum are common and are often treated as something to live with. They usually have several separate and treatable causes, and a trial showed that working through them with a w...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Brachytherapystandard-of-care: Brachytherapy places a radioactive source directly inside or next to the tumour.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Breast cancer after chest radiotherapy in childhood, and the screening that followsstandard-of-care: A girl who had radiotherapy to the chest carries a risk of breast cancer by age 50 of about 30 per cent. It is not only about dose: a low dose to the whole lung gave a higher standardised incidence than a high dose to a smaller field, because volume matters...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Breast MRI coils and abbreviated breast MRIestablished: Breast MRI is the most sensitive breast scan, done lying face down with the breasts in a special coil. Abbreviated protocols cut the scan from half an hour to a few minutes, which makes MRI screening of women with dense breasts or high risk affordable.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Breast reconstruction: implant and autologous, immediate and delayed, and what women report afterwardsstandard-of-care: Two years after surgery, women reconstructed from their own tissue reported more satisfaction with their breasts than women with implants, by about 8 points on a 100-point scale. After radiotherapy the gap widens and so does the complication rate: 38.9 per...Open in Atlas onco.cc
BREAST-Q and the Q-portfolio: measuring what an operation left behindestablished: A questionnaire built from what women actually said matters after breast surgery: satisfaction with how the breasts look and feel, and psychological, physical and sexual well-being, each scored separately. It is the reason reconstruction techniques can be c...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Breath and volatile-organic-compound detectionphase-2: Smelling cancer: measuring the trace chemicals a tumour puts into exhaled breath.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Breathing and exercise capacity after lung resectionestablished: Taking out a lobe takes away lung, and breathlessness on stairs is what people notice. Across 18 randomised trials and 1,795 patients, pulmonary rehabilitation after lung resection improved lung function, six-minute walk distance and physical quality of lif...Open in Atlas onco.cc

C

C-arm medical linear accelerators (TrueBeam, Versa HD and others)standard-of-care: The standard radiotherapy machine: an electron accelerator in a rotating arm that makes high-energy X-rays or electron beams, shapes them with moving metal leaves, and takes a CT of the patient before each dose. Most people who have radiotherapy are treated...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Cachexia pharmacotherapy: GDF-15 blockade, anamorelin, olanzapinephase-3: Cachexia pharmacotherapy covers three drug approaches to cancer wasting: ponsegromab, an antibody that blocks the appetite-suppressing hormone GDF-15 and is in phase 3; anamorelin, a ghrelin mimic approved only in Japan; and low-dose olanzapine, a generic t...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Cachexia-directed therapy (GDF-15 blockade)phase-3: Cachexia-directed therapy treats cancer wasting by blocking GDF-15, a hormone that rises in advanced cancer and acts on the brainstem to suppress appetite. Pfizer's antibody ponsegromab improved weight in a phase 2 trial and is in phase 2/3 in pancreatic ca...Open in Atlas onco.cc
CAIX PET (89Zr-girentuximab)phase-3: CAIX PET is a scan using an antibody against a protein almost unique to clear-cell kidney cancer, to tell cancer from benign kidney lumps without a biopsy.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Camouflage and restoration: fibres, micropigmentation, transplantationestablished: When density has not come back, the options are to hide the gap or to move hair into it. Keratin fibres and scalp micropigmentation are cheap, immediate and reversible; hair transplantation and surgical reconstruction have been reported in cancer survivors...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Cancer cell line encyclopedias and dependency mapsestablished: Large public collections of cancer cell lines profiled for their genomes, drug sensitivity and gene dependencies, the reference data behind much of modern target discovery.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Cancer interception vaccinesphase-2: Cancer interception vaccines immunise people who do not yet have cancer but carry a high inherited risk, such as Lynch syndrome carriers, against the antigens their future tumour is predicted to express, so memory T cells remove transformed cells early. Bec...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Cancer neuroscience: cutting the nerve supplyphase-2: Tumours recruit nerves and use nerve signals to grow. Blocking that traffic, with beta-blockers or botulinum toxin, is being tested.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Cancer pain managementstandard-of-care: Systematic treatment of cancer pain with opioids, adjuvant drugs, radiation and procedures such as nerve blocks and intrathecal pumps. Most pain can be controlled, yet under-treatment remains common, especially where opioids are unavailable.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Cancer registries and population surveillancestandard-of-care: The public systems that count every cancer diagnosis and death in a country, which tell us whether incidence and survival are improving.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Cancer rehabilitation: the discipline that puts function backestablished: Cancer rehabilitation is the medical speciality that treats what treatment leaves behind: weakness, a stiff shoulder, a swallow that no longer works, a bladder that leaks, a limb that swells. It is delivered by a named set of professions, it has randomised...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Cancer variant knowledgebases and molecular tumour boardsestablished: Curated databases that say what each mutation means for treatment, and the expert meetings that use them to decide on therapy.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Cancer-associated thrombosis prevention and treatmentstandard-of-care: Blood clots are the second commonest cause of death in people with cancer. Risk scores identify who should take preventive blood thinners during chemotherapy, and direct oral anticoagulants have largely replaced injections for treatment.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Cannabinoids for chemotherapy nausea (dronabinol, nabilone, medical cannabis)approved: Two synthetic cannabinoid tablets, dronabinol and nabilone, have been approved for chemotherapy nausea since 1985 and can help when standard anti-sickness drugs fail. Modern antiemetics work better for most people, and evidence for herbal cannabis or vaped...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Cannabis and cannabinoids for pain, appetite and cancer controlphase-2: Cannabis and cannabinoids are used by patients for pain, appetite and sleep. Three phase 3 trials of a THC:CBD mouth spray added to opioids did not beat placebo for cancer pain, dronabinol failed for appetite, and no human trial shows tumour control, so ASC...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Capsule endoscopy (PillCam, EndoCapsule, CapsoCam)established: A camera the size of a large vitamin pill that the patient swallows; it photographs the whole small intestine, which ordinary endoscopes cannot reach, and newer versions look at the colon as an alternative to colonoscopy for people who cannot or will not ha...Open in Atlas onco.cc
CAR-NK & CAR-macrophagephase-1: Putting the cancer-seeking receptor on natural killer cells or macrophages instead of T cells, which could be safer and off-the-shelf.Open in Atlas onco.cc
CAR-T against stroma: fibroblasts and myeloid cellspreclinical: Instead of attacking the cancer cell, engineering T cells to strip away the scaffolding and the suppressive immune cells that protect it.Open in Atlas onco.cc
CAR-T cell therapyapproved: A patient's T cells are removed, given a synthetic receptor that recognises the cancer, multiplied, and put back as a living drug.Open in Atlas onco.cc
CAR-T for glioma (IL13Rα2, GD2, EGFRvIII, multi-target)phase-1: Engineered immune cells delivered directly into the brain or spinal fluid. Some children with diffuse midline glioma, a brainstem tumour with no curative treatment, have had striking, if temporary, responses.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Carbon-ion synchrotrons and facilitiesestablished: Carbon ions are twelve times heavier than protons, so every clinical facility uses a synchrotron ring tens of metres across and fixed or huge rotating beamlines. Only about a dozen centres exist, in Japan, Germany, Italy, Austria, China, South Korea and Tai...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Carbon-ion therapyestablished: Heavier charged particles that kill even radiation-resistant tumours, available at only a handful of centres worldwide.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Carboplatin dosing by kidney function: the Calvert formula and how kidney function is measuredstandard-of-care: Carboplatin is dosed by kidney function rather than body size, using a formula from 1989 that aims at a set drug exposure. The formula is only as good as the kidney measurement fed into it: in a study of 2,471 people with cancer, the usual blood-test estima...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Cardio-oncologyestablished: Cardio-oncology builds heart risk assessment, monitoring and prevention into cancer care so patients can finish curative treatment without trading cancer for heart failure. It targets anthracycline and trastuzumab damage, checkpoint-inhibitor myocarditis an...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Cardiopulmonary exercise testing: the hardest number in recoveryestablished: A bike or treadmill test to exhaustion with a mask measuring the air breathed in and out, giving peak oxygen uptake. It is the most objective measure of what a body can do, and in breast cancer it showed that survivors sit around a quarter below healthy wom...Open in Atlas onco.cc
CD40 agonist antibodiesphase-2: Antibodies that switch on CD40 on dendritic cells and macrophages to kick-start an immune response against tumours that checkpoint drugs alone cannot reach.Open in Atlas onco.cc
CD47 and SIRP-alpha blockadephase-2: Drugs that remove the 'don't eat me' signal cancer cells show to macrophages, so the immune system's scavenger cells can engulf them; the lead programme was halted for safety.Open in Atlas onco.cc
CDK4/6 inhibitorsapproved: Pills that stop the cell-division engine, added to hormone therapy for the most common type of breast cancer.Open in Atlas onco.cc
CEA surveillance after colorectal cancer surgerystandard-of-care: Carcinoembryonic antigen is measured every few months for five years after bowel cancer surgery because a rising level often precedes visible recurrence; the trial that tested this found it catches more recurrences that can be operated on, though a survival...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Cell-free DNA methylation testsapproved: Blood tests that read chemical marks on fragments of DNA shed by tumours; the marks tell cancer DNA from normal DNA and hint at where the cancer is.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Cell-therapy orchestration and chain-of-identity softwareestablished: Scheduling and tracking software that makes sure each patient's cells come back to that patient, on time.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Cell-therapy release and potency testingestablished: The quality checks a CAR-T batch must pass before it can be given: sterile, correct identity, enough live CAR-positive cells, and no replicating virus.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Cell2Sentence / C2S-Scale (Yale, Google)emerging: Turns a cell's gene expression into a sentence so a normal language model can reason about it; a 27-billion-parameter version proposed a cancer immunotherapy idea that was confirmed in the lab.Open in Atlas onco.cc
CellFMemerging: CellFM is an 800-million-parameter single-cell model trained on 100 million human cells.Open in Atlas onco.cc
CellSearch circulating tumour cell countapproved: The only regulator-cleared blood test that counts whole cancer cells; five or more cells in a small tube of blood marks a worse outlook in metastatic breast, prostate and bowel cancer, though changing treatment on the count alone has not helped patients.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Cereblon E3 ligase modulators (CELMoDs)phase-3: Next-generation relatives of lenalidomide that make the cell's disposal machinery destroy the myeloma proteins Ikaros and Aiolos more completely, working after older drugs fail.Open in Atlas onco.cc
cfDNA fragmentomicsestablished: Fragmentomics reads the sizes and positions of DNA fragments in blood, not the mutations. Cancer cells die messily and leave a recognisable fragmentation pattern.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Chai-1 / Chai-2emerging: Structure and antibody-design models from Chai Discovery, with Chai-2 reporting high zero-shot antibody hit rates.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Chemistry42 and Pharma.AI (Insilico)emerging: Generative chemistry platform behind the first AI-discovered drug to reach phase 2, plus oncology candidates.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Chemoprevention & risk-reducing surgerystandard-of-care: Drugs or surgery for people at high inherited risk, before any cancer appears.Open in Atlas onco.cc
CHIEF (Harvard, Yu Lab)emerging: A pathology model trained across 19 cancer types that predicts survival and mutations from slides.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Children of a parent treated for cancerestablished: An estimated 1.58 million people in the United States living after a cancer diagnosis have a child under 18 at home, about 2.85 million children, and roughly 562,000 of them live with a parent in early treatment. The systematic review found no general exces...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Chronic graft-versus-host diseaseestablished: After a donor transplant the new immune system can treat the body it has landed in as foreign. When that goes on past the first few months it is called chronic graft-versus-host disease, and it affects roughly four in ten adults. It is treatable and often i...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Chronic GvHD organ by organ: skin, mouth, eyes, gut, liver, joints and genital tractestablished: Chronic GvHD is a pattern of injuries that can appear in several places at once: skin that thickens, a dry sore mouth, dry painful eyes, difficulty swallowing, abnormal liver tests, stiff joints, genital narrowing. Several of the best treatments are local r...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Chronotherapy: timing treatment to the body clockphase-2: Giving the same drug at a different time of day, because the body clock changes how much damage it does and how well the immune system responds.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Circulating tumour cell captureapproved: Fishing whole cancer cells out of a blood sample to count them or study them; the count is prognostic in breast, prostate and colorectal cancer.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Circulating tumour HPV DNA (ctHPV-DNA)established: A blood test that detects fragments of the virus DNA shed by HPV-positive throat cancers, to confirm diagnosis, track response, and catch recurrence early.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Clinical hypnosis for procedures, pain and hot flushesestablished: A brief hypnosis session before breast surgery or a biopsy reduces pain, nausea and anxiety afterwards, and a course of hypnosis roughly halved hot flushes in one randomised trial. It is a skill some psychologists offer, not a stage act.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Clinical NGS bioinformatics and variant interpretationestablished: Software that turns raw sequencer output into a report of which mutations matter and which drugs they point to.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Clinical trial software (EDC, eCOA, CTMS, RTSM)standard-of-care: Clinical trial software is the set of systems that collect trial data, randomise patients, and keep every form auditable.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Clonal evolution and branching modelsestablished: Peter Nowell's 1976 idea that a tumour is an evolving population of competing clones is now measured directly by sequencing several regions or repeated blood samples, and models of branching evolution predict which clones will drive relapse.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Clonal haematopoiesis after cancer treatmentestablished: Chemotherapy and radiotherapy do not select blood stem cells at random. They favour the ones carrying mutations in DNA-damage genes, which then expand. Most people with such a clone never develop a blood cancer, but the clone is a measurable mark of what tr...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Closed automated cell-therapy manufacturingestablished: Sealed, robot-run machines that turn a patient's blood cells into a CAR-T product with far fewer hands, clean rooms, and mistakes.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Closed-system transfer devices for hazardous drugs (PhaSeal, ChemoLock, Equashield)standard-of-care: Sealed connectors that let a pharmacist or nurse draw up and give chemotherapy without any drug vapour or droplet escaping, protecting the staff who handle these drugs every day.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Cobalt-60 teletherapyhistoric: The machine that made curative radiotherapy widely available from the 1950s: a sealed cobalt-60 source in a rotating head. Linacs replaced it in rich countries, but cobalt units still treat many patients where power and servicing are unreliable.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Coffee and tea intakeestablished: Coffee does not cause cancer: IARC downgraded it in 2016, and cohort studies link two to three cups a day with lower rates of liver and womb cancer. Drinks of any kind served above 65 C are classed as a probable cause of oesophageal cancer, so the temperatu...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Cognitive behavioural therapy for fatigue and distressestablished: Cancer-related fatigue and anxiety respond to structured talking therapy that targets the thoughts and habits that keep them going. Randomised trials show benefits during treatment and, for persistent fatigue, years afterwards; guidelines recommend it.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia (CBT-I)established: Insomnia is one of the most persistent problems after cancer treatment. A short structured talking therapy that retrains sleep habits works better and for longer than sleeping tablets, and digital versions bring it to people who cannot reach a therapist.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Colorectal cancer screening (colonoscopy, FIT, stool DNA, blood)standard-of-care: Finding and removing polyps before they become cancer. Colonoscopy prevents cancer; stool and blood tests catch it early and get more people screened.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Colposcopes and digital cervical screening devices (DYSIS, EVA System, AVE)established: The magnifying camera a gynaecologist uses to examine the cervix after an abnormal smear or HPV test, and the new portable and smartphone versions with software that scores the picture, built for clinics with no specialist in reach.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Colposcopy and excisional treatment (LEEP/LLETZ, cone)standard-of-care: Looking at the cervix with a magnifier after a positive screen, then removing the abnormal patch with an electric wire loop in a clinic visit.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Community oncology and site networksstandard-of-care: The clinics where most cancer patients are actually treated, increasingly organised into large networks that also run trials.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Companion diagnosticsstandard-of-care: The test that decides whether a specific drug is right for you, approved together with the drug.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Compounded hormone pelletsemerging: Pellets of compounded oestrogen and testosterone are implanted under the skin and sold as a way to feel young again. The National Academies reviewed the evidence and told prescribers to restrict their use: the claim that compounded preparations are safer or...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Comprehensive genomic profilingstandard-of-care: Sequencing hundreds of cancer genes at once from a biopsy to find the mutations a drug can target.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Compression, decongestive therapy and exercise for lymphoedemastandard-of-care: Arm or leg swelling after lymph node surgery or radiotherapy is managed with compression garments, specialised massage, skin care and exercise. Weight lifting, once forbidden, was shown in a randomised trial to reduce flare-ups rather than cause them.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Confocal microscopy and optical coherence tomography for skin (VivaScope, VivoSight, deepLive)established: Devices that look beneath the skin surface without cutting: one scans cells with a laser at microscope resolution, another builds a cross-section with infrared light. Both help decide whether a suspicious mole or patch needs a biopsy, and which edge to cut to.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Continuous and near-continuous ctDNA monitoringconcept: Instead of testing blood every three months, sampling constantly, so a relapse is caught the week it starts.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Contract research organisations (CROs)standard-of-care: Companies that run clinical trials for sponsors: sites, monitoring, data, and regulatory filing.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Contrast-enhanced mammographyestablished: A mammogram taken after an iodine contrast injection, at two X-ray energies, so that a tumour's blood supply shows up as a bright spot. It gives much of what breast MRI gives on a machine most breast units already own.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Creams and lotions tried to prevent chemotherapy hair lossnegative: Several drugs have been put on the scalp to stop chemotherapy hair loss before it starts: minoxidil lotion, vitamin D analogues, and others. The trials were done and they did not work. Scalp cooling remains the only method cleared by a regulator to prevent it.Open in Atlas onco.cc
CRISPR functional genomicsestablished: Knocking out every gene one at a time in cancer cells to find which ones they cannot live without.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Cryoablation systemsestablished: Killing a tumour by freezing it through one or more needles, with the ice ball watched live on CT, ultrasound or MRI. It hurts less than heat, spares nearby nerves and collecting systems better, and is the usual choice for small kidney tumours, painful bone...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Cryopreservation and cell-therapy cold chainestablished: Freezing cells at minus 150 degrees and shipping them in liquid-nitrogen 'dry shippers' with tracking, so a living drug arrives alive and matched to the right patient.Open in Atlas onco.cc
CT (computed tomography)standard-of-care: A CT scan is a fast 3D X-ray that shows the size and shape of tumours and whether they have spread.Open in Atlas onco.cc
CT body composition and sarcopenia measurementemerging: The staging CT scan every cancer patient already has can be measured for muscle and fat at the level of the third lumbar vertebra; low muscle predicts chemotherapy toxicity and shorter survival across cancers, and software now does the measuring automatically.Open in Atlas onco.cc
CT, MRI and PET scanner manufacturingstandard-of-care: The scanners that find and stage cancer are built by five companies in a dozen factories. Detectors, superconducting magnets and the helium that cools them are the parts that run short.Open in Atlas onco.cc
CT-FM (whole-body CT foundation model)emerging: A model pretrained on 148,000 CT scans to segment organs and triage findings.Open in Atlas onco.cc
ctDNA monitoring in lymphoma (PhasED-seq, clonoSEQ)emerging: A blood test that tracks lymphoma DNA far below what a PET scan can see, so doctors can tell early who is cured and who will relapse.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Curcumin and turmericphase-2: Curcumin, the yellow pigment in turmeric, kills cancer cells in a dish and is one of the most studied supplements, but it is barely absorbed from the gut and no randomised trial has shown it treats cancer in people. Cooking with turmeric is fine; high-dose...Open in Atlas onco.cc
CyberKnife robotic radiosurgeryestablished: A small accelerator on an industrial robot arm that aims hundreds of pencil-thin beams from any direction and follows the tumour as the patient breathes, so brain, spine, prostate, lung and pancreatic tumours can be treated in one to five sessions without a...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Cyclotron isotope production (F-18, Ga-68, Cu-64, Zr-89, At-211)standard-of-care: Proton-rich isotopes for PET scans and some therapies are made by hitting a target with a beam from a cyclotron. Fluorine-18 is made every morning within driving distance of the scanner; gallium-68 comes from either a generator or a cyclotron; copper-64 and...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Cystoscopy, blue-light imaging & TURBTstandard-of-care: Cystoscopy and TURBT mean looking inside the bladder with a camera and shaving off tumours through the urethra. Blue-light dyes make flat tumours easier to see.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Cytogenetics and FISHstandard-of-care: Looking at the leukaemia's chromosomes under a microscope, or lighting up specific gene breaks with fluorescent probes, to classify risk.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Cytokines & engineered cytokinesapproved: Cytokine therapy gives immune-signalling proteins as drugs. High-dose interleukin-2 was the first immunotherapy to cure some melanomas, at great toxicity.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Cytotoxic chemotherapystandard-of-care: Cytotoxic chemotherapy drugs (platinums, antimetabolites, microtubule agents and topoisomerase inhibitors) kill rapidly dividing cells by damaging DNA or the mitotic spindle. They still cure testicular cancer, lymphoma and leukaemia, and they are the warhea...Open in Atlas onco.cc

D

Dance and movement therapyphase-2: Dance and movement therapy is enjoyable and a form of exercise, and small trials hint at better quality of life and mood in women with breast cancer, but a Cochrane review found too little evidence to judge whether it helps beyond that.Open in Atlas onco.cc
De novo designed protein bindersphase-1: Designing a protein from scratch on a computer to grip a chosen target, instead of finding one in an animal or a library.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Decentralised and hybrid clinical trialsestablished: Running parts of a trial at home or locally, with telehealth, home nursing, and remote monitoring, so patients far from big centres can take part.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Degrader-antibody conjugate (DAC)phase-1: An ADC that delivers a protein-destroying molecule instead of chemotherapy, hitting targets inside the cell that were previously unreachable.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Dendritic cell vaccinesapproved: Vaccines made from a patient's own antigen-presenting cells loaded with tumour proteins; sipuleucel-T for prostate cancer was the first approved, and newer versions are tested in brain and other cancers.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Depression during and after cancer: the interview-based prevalence, and the care model that worksstandard-of-care: Diagnosed by psychiatric interview rather than questionnaire, depression affects about one in six people being treated for cancer: 16.3 per cent across 70 studies and 10,071 people. Years later the rate is no higher than in people who have not had cancer. T...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Dermoscopy, total-body photography & AI skin analysisestablished: Magnified skin imaging and whole-body photo mapping, increasingly read by algorithms, to find melanoma early and avoid unnecessary biopsies.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Dietary fibre and the gut microbiome for immunotherapy responseemerging: Patients who eat plenty of fibre and avoid probiotic pills seem to respond better to immunotherapy for melanoma, probably because fibre feeds the right gut bacteria. A proper trial is under way.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Dietary supplements during cancer treatment: interactions and harmsestablished: Most people on cancer treatment take supplements, often without telling their team. Antioxidants, St John's wort, high-dose vitamins and some herbs can blunt chemotherapy or radiotherapy or interact with targeted drugs.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Dietitian-led weight-loss programmes in HR-positive breast cancerphase-3: Being overweight after breast cancer is linked with more recurrence, so a 3,000-woman trial tested a two-year telephone weight-loss programme. Women lost weight, but the trial did not clearly show fewer recurrences.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Digital pathology & AIestablished: Scanning microscope slides and letting software measure things a pathologist cannot see, including predictions of who will benefit from a treatment.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Digital twins and virtual control armsemerging: Using a model of what would have happened to a patient on standard treatment, so fewer people have to be randomised to it.Open in Atlas onco.cc
DNA methylation profilingestablished: Reading chemical tags on DNA that reveal a cell's identity, used to classify brain tumours and to detect cancer in blood.Open in Atlas onco.cc
DNA origami nanorobotspreclinical: Folded DNA machines that open only when they touch a tumour, releasing a payload or clotting the tumour's blood supply.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Dose painting and biologically guided radiotherapyemerging: Instead of one uniform dose, the plan gives more to the parts of the tumour that imaging says are most resistant, such as hypoxic or highly active regions on PET.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Downstream purification (Protein A capture, viral clearance, polishing)standard-of-care: After hamster cells have grown an antibody drug, the antibody has to be fished out of a soup of cells, DNA and viruses and made pure enough to inject. Purification is where much of the cost and many of the bottlenecks of biologics sit.Open in Atlas onco.cc
DPYD genotyping and DPD phenotyping before fluoropyrimidinesstandard-of-care: A one-off blood test done before fluorouracil or capecitabine that finds the roughly one in twenty-five people who break the drug down too slowly. Lowering their starting dose reduces severe and occasionally fatal toxicity, and in the one matched comparison...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Dry mouth, teeth and taste after head and neck radiotherapystandard-of-care: Radiotherapy to the head and neck damages the salivary glands and, through the dry mouth that follows, the teeth. Planning that steers dose away from the parotid glands roughly halves lasting dryness and lets saliva recover over a year or two. Teeth need a...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Dual-energy and spectral CTestablished: CT scanned at two X-ray energies at once, so the scanner can tell iodine contrast from calcium and soft tissue, show exactly how much a tumour enhances, and remove the contrast digitally to save a second scan.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Dual-payload ADCphase-1: A dual-payload ADC is an ADC carrying two different poisons at once, so the tumour cannot escape by becoming resistant to one.Open in Atlas onco.cc

E

Early integrated palliative carestandard-of-care: Specialist care for symptoms, decision-making and quality of life given alongside cancer treatment from diagnosis, not just at the end. Trials show it improves quality of life and mood and may lengthen survival.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Education, work and the years that were interruptedestablished: Cancer in the years when education and first jobs happen costs more than the time taken. In the largest cohort, 23 per cent of childhood cancer survivors had used special education services against 8 per cent of siblings, and survivors of several cancers we...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Eight Sleep Pod: bed cooling and Hot Flash Modeemerging: A mattress cover that heats or cools each side of the bed, with a Hot Flash Mode that cools quickly when tapped. Its only evidence is a preprint by the company's own staff in menopausal women, not people on cancer hormone therapy, and the company says it is...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Elastography and contrast-enhanced ultrasoundestablished: Two upgrades to the ordinary ultrasound machine: elastography measures how stiff a lump is (cancers are usually hard), and microbubble contrast shows how blood flows through it in real time, with no radiation and no kidney-toxic dye.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Electrochemotherapyestablished: Brief electric pulses applied to a tumour open pores in cell membranes so that a tiny dose of bleomycin or cisplatin floods in; used for skin metastases and, increasingly, for deep tumours.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Electrochemotherapy devices (Cliniporator)established: A pulse generator and needle electrodes that give a tumour a few brief electric shocks minutes after a small dose of chemotherapy, opening the cells so the drug floods in. Used mostly for cancer nodules in the skin, now also for tumours inside the body.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Electron beam therapy systems (linac electrons, total skin electron units, mobile electron IORT)standard-of-care: Electron beams stop within a few centimetres of the skin, so they treat surface tumours, scars and the whole skin without reaching the organs underneath. Most linacs make them; special set-ups spread them over the entire body or deliver them during surgery.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Electronic patient-reported outcome (ePRO) symptom monitoringestablished: Patients report symptoms weekly through an app or web form, and nurses respond to alerts. Randomised trials showed this simple system improved quality of life, cut emergency visits and, in one trial, extended survival by five months.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Electronic patient-reported outcomes and remote monitoringestablished: Apps and sensors that let patients report symptoms between visits, which in trials improved survival and cut emergency visits.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Employment rights with cancer in the United Kingdomstandard-of-care: Schedule 1 of the Equality Act 2010 says in one sentence that "Cancer, HIV infection and multiple sclerosis are each a disability", so protection applies from the moment of diagnosis rather than when the illness starts to limit anything. That brings the emp...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Employment rights with cancer in the United Statesstandard-of-care: Federal regulation states that "cancer substantially limits normal cell growth", and the statute counts an impairment in remission if it would substantially limit a major life activity when active. The Americans with Disabilities Act reaches employers with...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Endocrine therapy (SERMs, AIs, SERDs)standard-of-care: Pills that block or remove oestrogen signalling, the mainstay of treatment for hormone-driven breast cancer for 50 years.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Endoscopic resection (EMR / ESD)standard-of-care: Endoscopic resection lifts an early cancer of the oesophagus or stomach with an injection and cuts it out from inside with a snare or electrosurgical knife, keeping the organ intact. It cures cancers confined to the mucosa (T1a) and gives a definitive depth...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Endoscopic ultrasound and EBUS systemsstandard-of-care: Endoscopes with an ultrasound probe on the tip, passed down the gullet or windpipe, that see through the wall of the gut or airway to stage tumours and guide a needle into lymph nodes and the pancreas without an operation.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Enformer and Borzoi (DeepMind, Calico)emerging: Models that predict how DNA sequence controls gene activity, used to interpret non-coding cancer mutations.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Engineered bacteria as living cancer drugsphase-2: Bacteria that seek out the low-oxygen core of tumours, then manufacture a drug on the spot.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Engineered exosomes as drug carriersphase-1: Loading the tiny vesicles cells naturally use to talk to each other with a cancer drug, so the body treats the carrier as its own.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Enhanced recovery (ERAS) and perioperative nutritionstandard-of-care: Instead of starving patients before and after an operation, modern surgical pathways feed them early, give carbohydrate drinks the night before, and get them walking the next day. Complications and hospital stays fall.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Enteral and parenteral nutrition supportestablished: Nutrition support means tube feeding into the gut, or nutrition into a vein when the gut cannot be used. It is life-saving in the right patient, harmful or futile in the wrong one.Open in Atlas onco.cc
EORTC QLQ-C30: the questionnaire most cancer trials usestandard-of-care: Thirty questions, answered about the past week, that produce separate scores out of 100 for how the body works, how the mind is, and for fatigue, pain and sickness. It is the questionnaire behind most European cancer trial results about quality of life, and...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Epigenetic age after cancer treatmentemerging: An epigenetic clock reads chemical marks on DNA and estimates how old the body looks, which is not always the age on a birth certificate. In survivors of childhood cancer the clock runs ahead of chronological age, and the gap is larger after radiotherapy an...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Epigenetic drugs (HDAC, DNMT, EZH2, IDH, menin, BET)approved: Drugs that change how genes are switched on and off without changing the DNA itself.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Epigenetic editing (durable gene silencing)concept: Switching a gene off for good without changing the DNA sequence, by writing chemical marks onto it.Open in Atlas onco.cc
EQ-5D: health reduced to one number, and what that number is forstandard-of-care: Five questions and a thermometer-style scale from worst to best imaginable health. The five answers are converted into a single index value using a country-specific value set, and that index is what health systems use to decide whether a treatment is worth...Open in Atlas onco.cc
ESM3 (EvolutionaryScale)emerging: ESM3 is a generative protein model that designed a working fluorescent protein far from any natural sequence.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Essiac, Hoxsey and other 'herbal cancer cures'negative: Essiac tea, Hoxsey tonic and similar herbal mixtures have been sold as cancer cures for a century. Laboratory tests and reviews by the NCI and Canadian regulators found no anticancer effect, and the clinics that sell them have never produced a controlled tr...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Evidence-based integrative oncologyestablished: Using complementary approaches with real evidence, such as acupuncture for nausea and pain, yoga and mindfulness for anxiety and fatigue, alongside standard treatment, while steering patients away from unproven 'alternative' therapies that can shorten life.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Evo 2 (Arc Institute, NVIDIA)emerging: A DNA language model trained on 9.3 trillion bases that can flag cancer-causing BRCA1 variants without being told about them.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Evolutionary dynamics of drug resistanceestablished: Mathematics from population genetics shows that resistant cells almost always exist before treatment in large tumours, and that combining drugs with different resistance mutations from the start can succeed where the same drugs in sequence fail.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Evolutionary game theory in canceremerging: Cancer cells are treated as players whose success depends on what neighbouring cells do, which lets researchers predict how a tumour's mix of cell types shifts under treatment and design schedules that steer it.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Ex vivo drug sensitivity screening in blood cancers (EXALT)phase-2: Blood cancer cells taken from a patient's blood or marrow are exposed within days to a panel of approved drugs, and the ones that kill the cancer cells while sparing healthy ones are offered back to the patient; a Vienna trial found this beat the previous t...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Exercise & lifestyle oncologyestablished: Structured exercise during and after treatment, which the CHALLENGE trial showed improves survival in colon cancer.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Exercise during chemotherapy and radiotherapyestablished: Moderate exercise while on chemotherapy is safe and reduces fatigue, helps people finish their planned doses, and may protect the heart and nerves.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Exercise is the best-evidenced thing on this front, and most survivors are not doing itestablished: Structured exercise has the strongest evidence of any recovery intervention, including a randomised survival benefit in colon cancer. In a population survey of blood cancer survivors, 46 per cent met neither the aerobic nor the strength guideline and 22 per...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Exosome injectionspreclinical: Exosomes are real biology and a serious research field. Exosome injections sold in clinics are neither. There are no approved exosome products anywhere, and the FDA issued a public safety notification after patients in Nebraska were seriously harmed by them.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Extended pleurectomy/decortication & radical mesothelioma surgeryhistoric: Pleurectomy and decortication are operations that strip the tumour-bearing lining from the lung and chest wall. They were long assumed to help; the MARS 2 trial showed they do not.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Extracorporeal photopheresis for graft-versus-host diseaseestablished: Blood is taken out through a machine, the white cells are treated with a light-sensitive drug and ultraviolet light, and given back. It is used for GvHD that steroids have not controlled, mainly skin and mouth, and it spares people more immunosuppression. I...Open in Atlas onco.cc

F

Facial reconstruction and facial prostheses: ears, orbits and nosesstandard-of-care: Where an ear, an eye socket or a nose cannot be rebuilt from the patient's own tissue, a silicone prosthesis is made and held by adhesive or by titanium implants in bone. Implant failure differs sharply by site: across 3,630 implants, 3.5 per cent failed at...Open in Atlas onco.cc
FACT-G and the FACIT family: the other main questionnairestandard-of-care: Twenty-seven questions about the past week, in four areas: the body, family and friends, feelings, and being able to do ordinary things. Dozens of add-ons exist for particular cancers and particular symptoms, including the fatigue scale used in most anaemia...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Faecal microbiota transplantation for PD-1 non-respondersphase-2: Transplanting gut bacteria from patients who responded to immunotherapy into those who did not. In small studies a minority of resistant melanomas started responding. Randomised trials are running.Open in Atlas onco.cc
FAPI PETphase-3: FAPI PET is a PET scan that lights up the scaffolding around almost any solid tumour, including cancers the standard sugar scan misses.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Fasting and fasting-mimicking diets around chemotherapyphase-2: Fasting-mimicking diets cut food intake for three days around each chemotherapy dose to lower glucose, insulin and IGF-1, which may shield normal cells and sensitise the tumour. The DIRECT trial in early breast cancer improved radiological response but fewe...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Fat grafting after cancer surgeryestablished: Taking fat from one part of the body and injecting it to fill a defect left by surgery is routine reconstructive practice. The question survivors ask is whether it wakes anything up. Matched studies have not found higher recurrence, but they are not randomi...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Fatigue after cancer treatment: what actually worksstandard-of-care: Fatigue is the commonest thing left behind by cancer treatment and the least treated: about a third of women in two large breast cancer cohorts still had severe fatigue years after diagnosis. What works is exercise, cognitive behavioural therapy and mindful...Open in Atlas onco.cc
FDG PETstandard-of-care: FDG PET is the standard PET scan. A radioactive sugar shows which tissues are burning glucose fast, which most cancers do.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Fear that the cancer will come back: how common it is, and when it stops being ordinary worryestablished: Almost everyone who finishes cancer treatment thinks about it coming back, and for about one in five the thought is severe enough to be worth treating. Pooling 9,311 people from 46 studies in 13 countries, 58.8 per cent scored 13 or more on a 36-point quest...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Federated learning and privacy-preserving AIemerging: Federated learning trains one AI model across hospitals by exchanging model updates, not patient data, so a pathology or radiology model learns from every site while records stay behind each firewall. Owkin, NVIDIA FLARE and the MELLODDY pharma consortium u...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Fenbendazole, ivermectin and other internet 'repurposed cures'negative: Dog dewormers and anti-parasite drugs are promoted on social media as hidden cancer cures on the strength of cell-culture experiments and anecdotes. No clinical trial shows benefit in people, liver damage has been reported, and drug repurposing is real but...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Fertility in boys and young men treated for cancer, including testicular tissue bankingestablished: Male survivors were about half as likely as their brothers to father a child, and the causes are specific: testicular radiotherapy above 7.5 gray, and high cumulative cyclophosphamide, ifosfamide, procarbazine or cisplatin. A young man with none of those wa...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Fertility in girls and young women treated for cancer, including ovarian tissue freezingstandard-of-care: Most female survivors treated with chemotherapy and no radiotherapy to the pelvis or brain can become pregnant: the large cohort that asked found chemotherapy-specific effects were few. The exceptions are busulfan, high-dose lomustine, pelvic and cranial ra...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Fertility, growth and what total body irradiation costsestablished: Transplant conditioning, and total body irradiation in particular, usually ends natural fertility and in children slows growth. The decisions that preserve the most are made before conditioning starts. A randomised trial in children with leukaemia tested re...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Fertility-sparing hormonal treatment of early endometrial cancerestablished: For young women with the earliest, low-grade endometrial cancers, progestin pills or a hormonal IUD can clear the cancer and allow pregnancy before a later hysterectomy.Open in Atlas onco.cc
FES PET (oestrogen receptor imaging)approved: A PET scan using a radioactive form of oestrogen that lights up every tumour deposit still carrying the oestrogen receptor, so doctors can see whether metastases across the body will respond to hormone treatment without biopsying each one.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Financial toxicity and financial navigationemerging: Cancer treatment can bankrupt patients even with insurance. Financial navigation programmes screen for money problems and connect patients to assistance, insurance optimisation and legal help, and trials show they reduce distress and debt.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Fish oil (EPA) for cancer weight lossphase-2: Fish oil rich in EPA was expected to slow cancer-related muscle wasting by damping inflammation. Randomised trials and a Cochrane review found no convincing effect on weight or survival, though fish oil is safe and sits comfortably inside general nutritiona...Open in Atlas onco.cc
FLASH radiotherapyphase-1: Delivering an entire dose in under a second, which in animals spares healthy tissue while still killing the tumour.Open in Atlas onco.cc
FLASH research accelerators (Oriatron, Mobetron FLASH, ProBeam FLASH)phase-1: Machines built or modified to deliver a whole radiation dose in a fraction of a second, so scientists can test whether ultra-fast dosing spares healthy tissue in people the way it does in animals.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Flow cytometersstandard-of-care: A machine that streams cells one at a time past lasers and reads the fluorescent tags stuck to each one, counting tens of thousands of cells a second. It is how leukaemias and lymphomas are typed, how residual disease is measured after treatment, and how ce...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Fluorescence-guided surgeryestablished: Injecting a dye that makes tumour glow so the surgeon can see exactly where to cut.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Fluorouracil dosing by measured blood levelemerging: Fluorouracil is dosed by body size, yet the amount of drug in the blood varies widely between people given the same dose. Measuring the level during the infusion and adjusting the next dose raised the response rate from 18 to 34 per cent in one randomised t...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Focused ultrasound & histotripsyestablished: Destroying tumours from outside the body with tightly focused sound waves, using either heat or microscopic bubbles.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Focused-ultrasound blood-brain barrier openingphase-2: Sound waves plus microbubbles briefly open the brain's protective barrier so chemotherapy or antibodies can get to the tumour.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Foresight (generative EHR model)emerging: A model trained on millions of hospital records that forecasts a patient's next diagnoses.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Frailty and late effects in survivorsestablished: The clearest evidence that treatment ages people is not a laboratory marker, it is what happens to survivors decades later. In the St Jude Lifetime Cohort, one in eight women who had cancer as a child met the clinical definition of frailty at a mean age of...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Frozen gloves, socks and compression for taxane nail and nerve damageemerging: Wearing frozen gloves and socks, or tight surgical gloves, during taxane infusions reduces nail damage and may reduce numbness in the hands and feet, by narrowing the blood vessels while the drug is at its peak. Trials are small but consistent, and it is ch...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Full weight-based chemotherapy dosing for people with obesitystandard-of-care: Chemotherapy doses used to be capped for larger people for fear of overdose. The American Society of Clinical Oncology guideline found that up to 40 per cent of people with obesity were given reduced doses, that the feared extra toxicity is unfounded, and r...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Functional (ex vivo) drug testingemerging: Growing a patient's own cancer cells in a dish and testing drugs on them directly, instead of guessing from genetics.Open in Atlas onco.cc

G

G8 geriatric screening toolestablished: An eight-question screen taking under five minutes, covering appetite, weight loss, mobility, mood, medicines, self-rated health and age, that flags which older cancer patients need a full geriatric assessment before treatment is decided.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Gamma Knifeestablished: The original radiosurgery machine: about two hundred cobalt-60 sources arranged in a shielded helmet whose beams cross at one point inside the brain, so a metastasis or benign tumour a few millimetres across receives a destructive dose in a single visit whi...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Gamma probes, handheld gamma cameras and dose calibratorsstandard-of-care: The small radiation detectors that make nuclear medicine and sentinel node surgery work: a pen-sized probe that clicks when the surgeon nears the radioactive lymph node, and the well counter in the hot lab that checks every dose before it is injected.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Gamma-delta T cell therapyphase-1: Cell therapies built from a rare T-cell type that recognises stressed cancer cells without needing tissue matching, making them candidates for off-the-shelf products.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Gamma-secretase inhibitorsapproved: Drugs that block the enzyme that activates Notch signalling; nirogacestat became the first approved, in 2023, for desmoid tumours, a rare but destructive growth of connective tissue.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Gastric cancer endoscopic screening (East Asia)standard-of-care: In Korea and Japan, where stomach cancer is common, adults have a camera examination of the stomach every two years, so most cancers are found early enough to remove through the endoscope.Open in Atlas onco.cc
GEARS and perturbation prediction benchmarksemerging: GEARS is a graph model predicting the effect of gene knockouts; the perturbation benchmarks around it showed how hard the problem is.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Gene-expression prognostic assaysapproved: Tests that measure a set of genes in a removed tumour to estimate how likely it is to come back, so patients with low scores can safely skip chemotherapy.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Geneformeremerging: Geneformer is a transformer trained on about 30 million single cells that encodes each cell as a ranked list of its genes, so deleting a gene in silico shows which genes matter in a disease. It was the first single-cell foundation model in general use, thou...Open in Atlas onco.cc
GenePTemerging: Uses text embeddings of gene descriptions from a general LLM to represent cells, and performs surprisingly well.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Generic oncology drug supply and shortage mitigationestablished: Keeping cheap, essential chemotherapy drugs like cisplatin available; shortages in 2023 forced rationing in US hospitals.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Generic sterile injectables (the 2023 platinum shortage)standard-of-care: Cisplatin, carboplatin, methotrexate and most old chemotherapy drugs are cheap vials made by very few factories under sterile conditions. In 2023 one Indian plant stopped and American cancer centres ran short of both platinum drugs for months.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Genetically engineered mouse modelsestablished: Mice carrying the same mutations as human cancers so that tumours arise in the right tissue with an intact immune system; the KPC pancreatic model is the best known.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Genomics cloud and secure research environmentsestablished: Cloud systems where hospitals and researchers store and analyse genomic data securely at petabyte scale.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Geriatric assessmentestablished: Geriatric assessment is a structured check of an older patient's fitness, memory, and support that predicts treatment tolerance better than age.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Germline (hereditary) testingstandard-of-care: A test of the DNA you were born with, to find inherited risk genes such as BRCA or Lynch syndrome.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Gerson therapy, coffee enemas and 'detox' regimensnegative: The Gerson regimen prescribes hourly juices, a strict low-salt vegetarian diet, supplements and several coffee enemas a day, and is sold at clinics in Mexico. It has never shown benefit in any controlled study, and coffee enemas have caused fatal electrolyt...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Getting psychological help after cancer: the stepped-care model, and what is actually commissionedestablished: The guideline answer is stepped care: education for everyone, named talking therapies for moderate symptoms, more intensive therapy for severe ones, and medication after those rather than before. The English four-level model that cancer services were built...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Ginger for chemotherapy nauseaphase-2: Ginger capsules taken alongside standard anti-sickness drugs reduced nausea in the largest randomised trial, but other trials found no effect and the doses and products vary. It is safe for most people, with a caution about bleeding for anyone on anticoagul...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Global oncology and access in low- and middle-income countriesemerging: Seventy percent of cancer deaths occur in low- and middle-income countries, where radiotherapy machines, pathologists, essential medicines and palliative care are scarce. Global oncology works on affordable, adapted care and the systems to deliver it.Open in Atlas onco.cc
GLP-1 receptor agonists and obesity-related cancer riskemerging: GLP-1 agonists, the new weight-loss injections, lower weight by 15-20%. Early observational data suggest fewer obesity-related cancers in people who take them, but no trial has yet tested cancer as an outcome.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Glutamine for mucositis and neuropathyphase-2: Oral glutamine, an amino acid that gut and mouth lining cells use for fuel, may reduce the severity of mouth ulcers during head and neck chemoradiation; mucositis guidelines suggest it for that use. Intravenous glutamine in transplant patients is not recomm...Open in Atlas onco.cc
GMP, inspections, Form 483s and warning lettersstandard-of-care: Every cancer drug plant works under Good Manufacturing Practice rules and is inspected. When inspectors find problems they write them up (a Form 483 in the United States), and if the answers are poor a public warning letter, an import ban or a court order c...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Going back to driving, lifting and exerciseestablished: These are the two questions people ask most often after an operation and the two with the least evidence behind the answers. No trial establishes when it is safe to drive after cancer surgery, and in the United Kingdom the licence holder must notify the DVL...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Going back to work after cancer: the rates, and the programmes that change themestablished: Pooled across 36 studies, 20,366 people who had had cancer and 157,603 controls, 33.8 per cent of those who had had cancer were unemployed against 15.2 per cent, a relative risk of 1.37. Of four kinds of return-to-work programme tested in trials, exercise a...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Goldie-Coldman model of resistanceestablished: Resistant cells arise by chance mutation as a tumour grows, so the chance of a cancer already containing resistant cells rises with its size. The model argued for treating early and for alternating non-cross-resistant drugs.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Gompertzian tumour growthestablished: Tumours do not grow exponentially forever: growth slows as they enlarge, following a curve Benjamin Gompertz devised for human mortality in 1825 and Anna Kane Laird fitted to tumours in 1964. It explains why small tumours are the most chemosensitive and why...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Green tea and EGCG extractsphase-2: Drinking green tea is safe and pleasant, but a Cochrane review found no consistent evidence that it prevents cancer, and concentrated green tea extract capsules have caused liver injury and can interfere with some drugs.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Growth and final height after treatment in childhood, and growth hormonestandard-of-care: Radiotherapy that reaches the pituitary stops the growth hormone signal, and radiotherapy to the spine stops the spine growing. In a Dutch cohort of 573 survivors, 8.9 per cent ended up more than two standard deviations below mean adult height, the largest...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Growth factors: G-CSF and febrile neutropenia preventionstandard-of-care: Injections of filgrastim or its long-acting form pegfilgrastim after chemotherapy make white cells recover faster, cutting the risk of life-threatening infections and allowing chemotherapy on schedule.Open in Atlas onco.cc

H

H-optimus (Bioptimus)emerging: An open 1.1-billion-parameter pathology model from a French startup, among the strongest on public benchmarks.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Hand-held and point-of-care ultrasoundestablished: Ultrasound probes the size of a phone that plug into a tablet, costing a few thousand pounds rather than tens of thousands, so a clinic nurse or district doctor can check a breast lump, a swollen neck node or a liver without sending the patient to a city ho...Open in Atlas onco.cc
HCC surveillance in cirrhosis (ultrasound + AFP)standard-of-care: People with cirrhosis or chronic hepatitis B get a liver ultrasound and a blood test every six months so cancer is caught while it is still curable.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Head and neck reconstruction: the free flap, and what it gives backstandard-of-care: Removing a tongue, a jaw or a pharynx leaves a hole that will not close, so tissue is moved from the forearm, thigh or lower leg with its own artery and vein and joined under a microscope. In a series of 843 flaps the overall failure rate was 4.0 per cent,...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Hearing after platinum and cranial radiotherapy in a developing childstandard-of-care: Hearing loss in a child still learning to speak and read costs more than the same loss in an adult. In the St Jude Lifetime Cohort, severe hearing impairment affected 34.9 per cent of platinum-treated survivors and 38.3 per cent of those irradiated at the c...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Hearing and tinnitus after platinum chemotherapyestablished: Cisplatin kills the hair cells of the inner ear, starting at the high frequencies, and the loss does not come back. In children, sodium thiosulfate given six hours after each dose cut hearing loss from 63 to 33 per cent in one randomised trial and from 56.4...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Heart function after anthracyclines, trastuzumab and chest radiotherapystandard-of-care: Most heart damage from anthracycline chemotherapy appears within the first year after it finishes, and most of it improves at least partly when it is caught and treated. Heart muscle weakened by trastuzumab usually recovers when the drug is stopped. Radioth...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Hedgehog pathway inhibitorsapproved: Pills that block a developmental signalling pathway hijacked by basal cell skin cancer, shrinking tumours that cannot be operated on; also used in some leukaemia.Open in Atlas onco.cc
HER2 PETphase-2: HER2 PET is a PET scan using radiolabelled trastuzumab or smaller HER2 binders to map HER2 across all metastases at once.Open in Atlas onco.cc
HER2 tyrosine kinase inhibitorsapproved: Small pills that block HER2 from inside the cell, complementing antibody drugs; tucatinib is notable for working against brain metastases.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Hibou (HistAI)emerging: Hibou is a family of open pathology foundation models under a permissive licence.Open in Atlas onco.cc
High-dose intravenous vitamin Cphase-2: Vitamin C tablets do not treat cancer: two randomised trials at the Mayo Clinic settled that in the 1980s. Intravenous doses reach blood levels high enough to generate hydrogen peroxide in tumours, and small trials alongside chemotherapy are under way, but...Open in Atlas onco.cc
High-dose-rate brachytherapyestablished: A tiny, intensely radioactive source is stepped through applicators placed in or beside the tumour for a few minutes at a time, then withdrawn, so the dose is delivered from inside without leaving anything behind.Open in Atlas onco.cc
High-risk pancreatic surveillance (CAPS / PRECEDE)established: Yearly MRI or endoscopic ultrasound for people with inherited risk, which catches pancreatic cancers while they are still operable.Open in Atlas onco.cc
High-throughput screening and DNA-encoded librariesestablished: Testing millions or billions of chemical compounds against a cancer target automatically to find starting points for new drugs.Open in Atlas onco.cc
HIPEC / PIPAC (intraperitoneal chemotherapy)established: Washing the abdominal cavity with heated chemotherapy during surgery to kill microscopic peritoneal deposits.Open in Atlas onco.cc
HIPEC perfusion pumps and PIPAC nebulisersestablished: The pump and heater that circulate warm chemotherapy through the abdomen at the end of an operation for cancer that has spread across the abdominal lining, and the small nebuliser that sprays chemotherapy as an aerosol through keyhole ports when surgery is...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Histology automation and IHC autostainersstandard-of-care: Histology automation is the robots that process tissue into slides and stain them for biomarkers such as HER2 and PD-L1, the same way every time.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Histopathology & immunohistochemistrystandard-of-care: Histopathology means looking at cancer cells under a microscope, and immunohistochemistry stains them for specific proteins. Together they are still the foundation of every diagnosis.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Histotripsy as an immune primerphase-1: Destroying a tumour mechanically with sound, rather than heat, leaves the debris intact enough for the immune system to learn from it.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Homeopathynegative: Homeopathic remedies are diluted until no molecules of the starting substance remain, so any effect would need new physics. A Cochrane review of trials for chemotherapy and radiotherapy side effects found no convincing evidence that they work; they are harm...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Honey for radiation mucositisphase-2: Swallowing honey before and after head and neck radiotherapy sessions reduced mouth ulcers in several small trials, mostly from single centres, but the studies are of low quality and mucositis guidelines could not make a recommendation either way.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Hormones, metabolism and the heart after transplantestablished: Transplant conditioning can leave the thyroid underactive, the ovaries or testes not working, and the handling of sugar and fat altered in a way that raises heart risk years later. Much of this is treatable with ordinary medicine, and the familiar things ab...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Hospice and end-of-life carestandard-of-care: Care in the last months of life focused entirely on comfort, at home or in a hospice, when cancer treatment no longer helps. Enrolling earlier than the typical two to three weeks gives patients and families more benefit.Open in Atlas onco.cc
How chronic GvHD is diagnosed and scored: the NIH consensus criteriaestablished: There is an agreed way to say how bad chronic GvHD is, and every trial, drug label and treatment decision uses it. Each affected organ scores 0 to 3, and the pattern gives an overall verdict of mild, moderate or severe. Worth asking: which organs are scored...Open in Atlas onco.cc
How long it takes to diagnose cancer in a young person, and what the evidence actually saysestablished: Young people often say their cancer took a long time to diagnose, and the research agrees that time to diagnosis varies widely by tumour type and age. What the research does not support is a single number: a systematic review found the studies used differen...Open in Atlas onco.cc
How much illness childhood cancer survivors carry, and at what ageestablished: The figures, with the cohort and the age attached, because they are misquoted more than any others. On self-report at a mean age of 26, 62.3 per cent of survivors had a chronic condition. On clinical testing, the cumulative prevalence of any chronic conditi...Open in Atlas onco.cc
How recovery is measured: the questionnaires behind the numbersstandard-of-care: Nearly every figure about recovery after cancer, for fatigue, for quality of life, for how a body works after treatment, comes from a questionnaire somebody filled in about themselves. That is a strength, because nobody else can report how a person feels, a...Open in Atlas onco.cc
HPV & HBV vaccinationstandard-of-care: Vaccines that prevent the viral infections behind cervical, throat, anal, and liver cancers. The most effective anti-cancer intervention ever created.Open in Atlas onco.cc
HPV DNA testing and self-samplingstandard-of-care: A swab tested for the virus that causes cervical cancer, more accurate than the Pap smear and doable at home.Open in Atlas onco.cc
HRD & BRCA testingstandard-of-care: Tests that reveal whether a tumour has a broken DNA repair system, which predicts response to PARP inhibitors and platinum.Open in Atlas onco.cc
HRD genomic scar scores (GIS, LOH, HRDetect)standard-of-care: A family of sequencing scores that read the scars a broken DNA repair system leaves across a tumour's genome; a high score qualifies ovarian cancer patients for PARP inhibitor maintenance even without a BRCA mutation.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Humanised mouse modelsestablished: Immunodeficient mice given a human immune system from stem cells, so human immunotherapies and CAR-T cells can be tested against human tumours in a living animal.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Hydrazine sulfatenegative: Hydrazine sulfate was promoted in the 1970s and 80s to reverse cancer weight loss and prolong life. Three large randomised trials sponsored by the National Cancer Institute found no benefit and more side effects, and the compound is a suspected carcinogen.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Hyperbaric oxygen for late radiation injuryestablished: Breathing pure oxygen in a pressurised chamber, over 30 to 40 sessions, helps heal radiation damage to the jaw, bladder and bowel that appears years after treatment. A Cochrane review found moderate-quality evidence of benefit for these sites, and little fo...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Hyperbaric oxygen sold as rejuvenationemerging: Hyperbaric oxygen has real randomised evidence for a short list of late radiation injuries, and none at all for the general claims made for it in wellness clinics. The distinction is worth holding, because the clinics use the real indications to sell the in...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Hyperthermiaestablished: Hyperthermia heats tumours to 40-43 °C to make radiation and chemotherapy work better.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Hyperthermia systems (BSD-2000, EHY-2000, superficial and interstitial applicators)established: Machines that warm a tumour to about 40 to 43 degrees for an hour using radio waves or microwaves from outside the body, making the radiotherapy or chemotherapy given alongside work better. Few hospitals own one.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Hypofractionated radiotherapyestablished: Fewer, larger daily doses instead of the classic five to seven weeks of small ones. Large trials in breast and prostate cancer showed the same control with the same or fewer late effects and far less time in hospital.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Hypoxia-activated prodrugsphase-2: A harmless molecule that turns into a poison only where there is no oxygen, which in the body means inside a tumour.Open in Atlas onco.cc

I

ICANS, and whether thinking recovers after CAR-Testablished: CAR-T can cause a short-lived brain disturbance in the first weeks: confusion, trouble finding words, tremor, sometimes seizures. It almost always resolves. Afterwards, measured outcomes for most people are close to the general population, while a substanti...Open in Atlas onco.cc
IDH inhibitorsapproved: Pills that block mutant IDH1 or IDH2 enzymes, which flood cells with a metabolite that blocks maturation; approved in leukaemia, bile duct cancer and low-grade glioma.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Imaging core labs and central reviewstandard-of-care: Independent radiologists who re-read every scan in a trial the same way, so response rates mean the same thing across hospitals.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Imaging mass cytometryemerging: A way to stain a tumour slice for dozens of proteins at once using metal-tagged antibodies read by a mass spectrometer, giving a detailed map of which cells are where.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Immune checkpoint inhibitorsstandard-of-care: Immune checkpoint inhibitors are antibodies against CTLA-4, PD-1 or PD-L1 that release the brakes on T cells so they attack the cancer. They are approved in more than 20 tumour types and produce lasting, sometimes curative responses that chemotherapy rarely...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Immune endocrine damage is usually permanent, and almost nobody is toldestablished: Most immune side effects of checkpoint inhibitors settle. The hormone glands are the exception: a pituitary, thyroid, adrenal or insulin-making gland destroyed by the immune system does not grow back, and the replacement treatment that follows is usually fo...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Immune-stimulating antibody conjugate (ISAC)phase-1: An immune-stimulating antibody conjugate (ISAC) is an ADC whose payload wakes up the immune system inside the tumour rather than poisoning the cell.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Immuno-PETphase-2: PET scans built from radiolabelled antibodies or their fragments, to see any protein an antibody can reach, including immune cells inside tumours.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Immunocytokines (antibody-cytokine fusions)phase-3: Cytokines such as interleukin-2 or TNF fused to an antibody that homes to the tumour, aiming to concentrate the immune boost where it is needed and spare the rest of the body.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Immunoglobulin and T-cell receptor clonality testing: A test that asks whether a group of lymphocytes is one family descended from a single cell, or a crowd of unrelated ones. Cancer is one family. It is used when the appearance under the microscope is not enough to decide.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Immunonutrition before cancer surgeryemerging: Drinks enriched with arginine, omega-3 fats and nucleotides for a week before a big operation seem to reduce infections afterwards, though the trials are old and mostly industry-funded.Open in Atlas onco.cc
IMRT / IGRT (modern external beam)standard-of-care: IMRT and IGRT shape the radiation beam to the tumour's outline from multiple angles and check the patient's position with a scan before every session, so surrounding organs receive less dose. Fewer, larger doses are now standard in breast and prostate cance...Open in Atlas onco.cc
In situ vaccinationphase-2: Treating one tumour so aggressively that the immune system learns to attack every other one, using the tumour itself as the vaccine.Open in Atlas onco.cc
In vivo base and prime editing for cancerconcept: In vivo base and prime editing would rewrite a cancer's DNA letter by letter inside the body. It works in the liver for inherited disease; nobody has yet corrected a cancer this way in a person.Open in Atlas onco.cc
In vivo CAR-Tphase-1: Instead of engineering T cells in a factory, an injection reprograms them inside the patient's body.Open in Atlas onco.cc
In vivo dosimetry and patient-specific quality assuranceestablished: Measuring the dose the patient actually receives, with detectors on the skin or the imaging panel behind them, to catch errors before they cause harm.Open in Atlas onco.cc
In-room imaging for radiotherapy (cone-beam CT, ExacTrac, CT-on-rails, HyperSight)standard-of-care: The scanners built into or beside the radiotherapy machine that photograph the patient seconds before the beam fires, so the tumour is where the plan expects and, on the newest machines, so the plan can be redrawn to that day's anatomy.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Infection risk after transplant and cell therapy, phase by phase, and the prophylaxis that follows itstandard-of-care: Which infections threaten someone after a transplant depends almost entirely on how long it has been, because the immune system returns in a known order: bacteria and fungi first, viruses such as cytomegalovirus in the middle months, encapsulated bacteria l...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Infusion pumps, ports, and ambulatory chemotherapy devicesstandard-of-care: Infusion devices are the implanted ports, smart pumps, and take-home pumps that deliver chemotherapy safely, including 46-hour infusions patients carry home.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Insurance, mortgages and the right to be forgottenemerging: Nine European Union countries have passed laws giving people who have had cancer the right not to declare it when applying for a loan or insurance after a set period, commonly five to ten years for adults and five for a cancer diagnosed young. Where the law...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Intraoperative fluorescence and Cerenkov imaging systems (SPY, Firefly, LumiSystem, LightPath)established: Cameras in the operating theatre that see dyes the surgeon's eye cannot: green dye lighting up lymph nodes and blood supply, pink glow marking a brain tumour, and even the faint light from a PET tracer in a removed specimen. They turn the dyes into a pictur...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Intraoperative margin assessment in breast-conserving surgeryestablished: Ways of checking, before the operation ends, whether cancer reaches the edge of the breast tissue removed, so the surgeon can take more there and then instead of operating again days later. In randomised trials a radiofrequency probe cut second operations f...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Intraoperative MRI and CTestablished: Scanners built into or next to the operating theatre, so the surgeon can check during a brain tumour or spine operation how much tumour is left and remove more before closing.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Intraoperative radiotherapy (IORT)established: Giving a single large dose of radiation directly to the tumour bed during surgery, with normal organs moved out of the way; used mainly in breast cancer as an alternative to weeks of external radiotherapy.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Intratumoural gene electrotransfer (IL-12 plasmid)phase-2: Intratumoural gene electrotransfer injects a plasmid carrying the interleukin-12 gene into a tumour and pushes it into cells with electric pulses, so this T-cell-activating cytokine is made locally instead of at the toxic doses intravenous IL-12 needed. It...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Intravenous NAD+ dripsemerging: An NAD+ drip takes several hours, is sold in courses, and has never been tested against placebo for anything a cancer survivor would recognise. The published human literature on intravenous NAD+ amounts to retrospective series and narrative reviews.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Intravesical therapy (BCG, chemotherapy, devices, gene and viral therapy)standard-of-care: Treating early bladder cancer by putting the drug straight into the bladder through a catheter, so the whole body is spared.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Iron overload after transplantestablished: Every unit of red cells carries iron the body cannot excrete, and someone who has been through leukaemia treatment may have had dozens. It settles in the liver and sometimes the heart. A blood test finds it and an MRI confirms it, and it can be removed eith...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Irreversible electroporation (NanoKnife)established: Irreversible electroporation uses short high-voltage pulses that punch permanent holes in tumour cells while sparing nearby vessels and ducts.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Isolated limb perfusion and infusionestablished: Isolating the blood supply of an arm or leg so that chemotherapy doses 15-20 times higher than the body could tolerate can be circulated through it, to save limbs with melanoma or sarcoma that would otherwise be amputated.Open in Atlas onco.cc

K

KAT6 inhibitorsphase-3: First-in-class drugs against the histone acetyltransferases KAT6A and KAT6B, in late trials for hormone receptor-positive breast cancer that has stopped responding to endocrine therapy.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Ketogenic diets in glioblastomaphase-2: A ketogenic diet restricts carbohydrate so the body runs on ketones, on the theory that glioblastoma cells depend on glucose while neurons can burn ketones. Small trials show it is safe and achievable for three to six months with supervision, but none has s...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Kidneys after cisplatin, ifosfamide, radiotherapy and nephrectomy in childhoodestablished: A Cochrane review of 61 studies found reported rates of kidney damage after childhood cancer treatment ranging from nought to 84 per cent, which is a statement about the literature rather than about kidneys. On systematic clinical testing of one large cohor...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Knowledge-based and automated treatment planningestablished: Software that learns from hundreds of past plans what dose distribution is achievable for a new patient, and produces a plan in minutes that a planner would have taken hours to reach.Open in Atlas onco.cc
KRAS & RAS inhibitorsapproved: Drugs against the most common cancer gene, considered impossible to target until sotorasib in 2021.Open in Atlas onco.cc

L

Laetrile (amygdalin, 'vitamin B17')negative: Laetrile, sold as vitamin B17 or apricot kernel extract, was tested in a large National Cancer Institute study in the 1980s and did nothing against cancer. It releases cyanide in the gut, and people have been poisoned by it.Open in Atlas onco.cc
LAG-3 blockadeapproved: Antibodies against LAG-3, another brake on tired T cells; relatlimab plus nivolumab became the first approved LAG-3 combination for melanoma in 2022.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Laser interstitial thermal therapy (LITT)established: Laser interstitial thermal therapy guides a laser fibre through a small skull hole, monitored by real-time MRI, to heat and destroy deep brain tumours a surgeon could not safely reach.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Laser interstitial thermal therapy systems (NeuroBlate, Visualase)established: Two commercial systems thread a laser fibre through a hole the width of a pencil into a brain tumour and cook it while the surgeon watches the temperature on live MRI. They reach tumours too deep or too risky to remove with open surgery.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Late deaths after childhood cancer, what causes them, and the proof that gentler treatment workedestablished: Five-year survivors still die earlier than their peers, but much less than they did. Fifteen-year mortality among American five-year survivors fell from 12.4 per cent for children treated in the early 1970s to 6.0 per cent for those treated in the 1990s, an...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Late effects after a stem cell transplantestablished: There are now around half a million people alive worldwide who have had a blood or marrow transplant. Most of them have at least one lasting health problem from it, and many have several. The list is long and reads heavily, but almost every item on it is ei...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Lattice and GRID radiotherapyphase-2: Lattice radiotherapy deliberately treats a bulky tumour unevenly, placing peaks of tumour-destroying dose at spaced points inside it while the tissue between receives far less, relying on bystander and immune effects to extend the kill. It runs on standard...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Limb salvage, amputation, and the rehabilitation that follows eitherstandard-of-care: Saving a limb with a metal endoprosthesis gives better walking efficiency and better return to normal living than an above-knee amputation, and studies that asked patients about overall quality of life found the two closer than expected. On the Toronto Extr...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Limb-salvage surgery and endoprosthetic reconstructionstandard-of-care: Removing a bone or soft-tissue sarcoma while keeping the arm or leg, rebuilding with metal implants, bone grafts or growing prostheses in children.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Linac, proton system and brachytherapy machine manufacturingstandard-of-care: Radiotherapy machines are built by a very small number of companies. Two of them make most of the world's linear accelerators, a handful build proton systems, and installing, commissioning and servicing a machine is as much a part of the supply chain as bui...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Liquid biopsy (ctDNA)standard-of-care: A blood test that reads fragments of DNA shed by the tumour, so you can genotype or monitor cancer without a needle in the tumour.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Liver transplantation for cancer (Milan criteria and beyond)standard-of-care: Replacing the whole diseased liver cures both the cancer and the cirrhosis underneath it, for patients whose tumours are small enough.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Living with a stoma, and living after an amputationestablished: A stoma changes how the body works in public, and the comparisons of quality of life after a stoma against a restored bowel are small and mixed. After bone sarcoma of an arm or leg the finding is the one people least expect: most studies comparing amputatio...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Log-kill hypothesis (Skipper)established: A dose of chemotherapy kills a constant fraction of cancer cells, not a constant number, so each cycle removes the same proportion, which is why treatment continues after the tumour has disappeared from scans.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Logic-gated therapeutics (AND, NOT gates)phase-1: Cells or drugs that fire only when two conditions are true at once, so healthy tissue expressing just one of them is spared.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Long-read sequencing (PacBio, Oxford Nanopore)established: Long-read sequencing (PacBio HiFi, Oxford Nanopore) reads single DNA molecules in stretches of thousands of bases, so rearrangements, repeat expansions, gene fusions and methylation appear in one run where short-read machines miss them. Nanopore can classif...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Long-term follow-up for gene-modified cell products: fifteen years, and whystandard-of-care: If you were given a treatment in which your own cells were genetically modified, you are expected to be followed up for fifteen years. Not because something is known to go wrong, but because the gene is inserted permanently and the only honest way to find o...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Long-term follow-up in the United Kingdom: what a survivor is actually offeredstandard-of-care: Britain sorts survivors into three levels of follow-up by how intensive their treatment was: a postal or telephone review at one end, a specialist late-effects clinic at the other. A Scottish cohort applied the levels retrospectively and found they worked:...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Low-dose CT lung screeningstandard-of-care: A yearly low-radiation CT scan for current and former heavy smokers that finds lung cancer early enough to cure it.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Low-dose-rate seed brachytherapyestablished: Dozens of rice-grain-sized radioactive seeds are implanted permanently in the prostate in a single procedure and deliver their dose over months.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Low-level light therapy (photobiomodulation) for hairphase-2: Red and near-infrared light from a cap, comb or in-clinic device, sold for hair growth and tested twice in breast cancer. Adding it to scalp cooling did not improve on scalp cooling alone, and a separate caution applies to shining light at tissue where a tu...Open in Atlas onco.cc
LSD1 inhibitorsphase-2: Drugs against the histone demethylase LSD1, which keeps blood and neuroendocrine cancer cells from maturing; being tested in myelofibrosis, leukaemia and small cell lung cancer.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Lutetium-177 radioligand therapyapproved: Cancer-seeking molecules carrying the radioactive metal lutetium-177, which delivers short-range radiation to tumours it binds; approved for neuroendocrine tumours and prostate cancer.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Lymphoedema: catching it early, and the operations for itemerging: Two things have changed. Measuring the limb regularly after surgery, so that a month of compression can start before swelling is obvious, cut progression to full decongestive treatment from 19.2 to 7.9 per cent in a randomised trial. And joining lymphatics...Open in Atlas onco.cc

M

Magnetic nanoparticle hyperthermiaphase-2: Magnetic nanoparticle hyperthermia injects iron-oxide nanoparticles into a tumour and heats them from outside with an alternating magnetic field.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Mammography & tomosynthesisstandard-of-care: Low-dose breast X-ray used for screening. Newer 3D versions find more cancers with fewer false alarms.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Masked / conditionally active ADCphase-2: An ADC wearing a mask that only comes off inside the tumour, so it ignores the same protein on healthy tissue.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Massage therapy in cancer careestablished: Gentle massage by a trained oncology massage therapist gives short-term relief of pain, anxiety and mood in people with advanced cancer, shown in a randomised trial of 380 patients. It is safe when pressure is adapted around tumours, bone metastases, ports...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Mathematical models of cancer (mathematical oncology)established: Mathematical oncology writes down how tumours grow, evolve, respond to treatment and interact with the immune system as equations or simulations, then uses them to design doses, schedules and trials. The models themselves are records, each with what it was...Open in Atlas onco.cc
MDM2 inhibitorsphase-3: Drugs that stop MDM2 destroying p53, reawakening the cell's guardian protein in tumours where p53 is intact but suppressed, such as some sarcomas and leukaemias.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Measuring fear of recurrence: the FCRI and its cut-offestablished: The most commonly reported unmet need after cancer treatment has a questionnaire of its own. The full version has 42 questions across seven components; the nine-question short form is the one used to screen, and a score of 22 or more marks a level of fear t...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Measuring lymphoedema: tape, bioimpedance and the quality of life scalesestablished: There are two separate questions, how big the limb is and how much it affects the person, and they need different instruments. Limb volume is measured by tape, by water displacement or by a device that passes a small current through the tissue; the effect o...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Measuring memory and concentration after treatmentestablished: What a person notices about their own memory and what a formal test measures are two different things, and they agree only weakly. The questionnaire most used for the first is FACT-Cog; the tests used for the second were standardised by an international tas...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Measuring muscle and fat on scans the patient already hadestablished: A single slice of a CT scan at the third lumbar vertebra measures how much skeletal muscle a person has, and the scan has usually already been taken for staging. Low muscle predicts worse outcomes and more chemotherapy toxicity, including in people whose we...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Med-Gemini and MedLM (Google)emerging: Google's medical versions of its Gemini models, able to reason over text, images, and long records.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Medical cyclotrons, hot cells, and synthesis modulesstandard-of-care: The particle accelerators and shielded robotic chemistry boxes that make PET tracers in hospital basements and commercial pharmacies.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Medicinal mushrooms: reishi, turkey tail, shiitake and othersphase-2: Reishi, turkey tail, shiitake, maitake and cordyceps extracts are rich in beta-glucans that stimulate natural killer cells in the laboratory and are sold as supplements to people with cancer. A 2016 Cochrane review found five small, poor-quality reishi tria...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Mediterranean and plant-forward dietary patternsestablished: Diets built around vegetables, wholegrains, legumes, nuts, fish and olive oil, with little red or processed meat, are linked with lower cancer risk and better survival after diagnosis. The evidence is strong for the pattern, weak for any single food.Open in Atlas onco.cc
MedSAM / SAM-Med3D (segment anything for medicine)emerging: Adaptations of Meta's Segment Anything model that outline tumours and organs on any scan with a click.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Melatonin as a cancer adjunctphase-2: Melatonin helps some people sleep and is safe at usual doses, but the claim that high-dose melatonin improves survival rests on a series of small unblinded trials from one group that has never been reproduced elsewhere. It is not a cancer treatment.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Memory, attention and learning after treatment of a childhood cancerestablished: The commonest pattern after cranial radiotherapy in a young child is not forgetting what was learned but learning more slowly than other children, so the gap widens with every year at school. In 44 children treated for medulloblastoma the measured loss was...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Menin inhibitorsapproved: Pills that break the interaction between menin and the KMT2A protein that acute leukaemias with KMT2A rearrangements or NPM1 mutations depend on; revumenib was the first approved, in 2024.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Menopause brought on by cancer treatment, and the options for itestablished: Treatment can bring on menopause in a week rather than a decade, and the usual answer, hormone replacement, is often unavailable. The non-hormonal options now have real trial evidence: elinzanetant cut moderate to severe hot flushes by three and a half epis...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Merlin (Stanford abdominal CT vision-language model)emerging: Merlin is a model trained on 15,000 CT scans with their reports that can find and describe hundreds of findings.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Mesenchymal stromal cells for tissue damageapproved: There is one licensed mesenchymal cell product in oncology and it is for one narrow use: children whose graft-versus-host disease has not responded to steroids. Everything else sold as a mesenchymal or stromal cell infusion for repair or rejuvenation is unl...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Metabolic therapy: starving the tumour of a nutrientphase-2: Removing an amino acid or nutrient that certain tumours cannot make for themselves, while normal cells can.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Metastatic seeding and dormancy modelsemerging: From Paget's seed-and-soil idea to models that estimate when metastases were seeded from a primary and how long they lay dormant, these frameworks explain late relapse and argue for treating micrometastases early.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Metformin as an anti-ageing drug after cancerphase-3: Metformin is cheap, old and safe enough that it is the obvious candidate for a drug that slows ageing. The largest cancer trial ever run on it, in 3,649 women with breast cancer, found nothing. The trial designed to test whether it slows ageing itself has n...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Methylation classifier for brain tumoursestablished: A test that reads the methylation pattern of a brain tumour's DNA and matches it to a reference library, giving a more reliable diagnosis than the microscope alone.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Methylation classifier for sarcomasemerging: The brain tumour methylation classifier's sibling for sarcomas: a genome-wide methylation array read by a machine-learning model that assigns a bone or soft tissue tumour to one of more than sixty classes, useful when the microscope cannot decide.Open in Atlas onco.cc
MIBG imaging and 131I-MIBG therapyestablished: A noradrenaline look-alike that neuroblastoma cells swallow: labelled with a small amount of radioactivity it shows the tumour on a scan; with a large amount it treats it.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Microbiome modulation to unlock immunotherapyphase-2: Changing the gut bacteria of a patient whose immunotherapy stopped working, in the hope of restarting the response.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Microwave and radiofrequency ablation systemsstandard-of-care: Cooking a tumour from the inside through a needle. Radiofrequency current was the first method and is proven for small liver cancers; microwave energy heats faster, makes larger zones and is less troubled by nearby blood vessels carrying the heat away, so i...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Midnight (kaiko.ai)emerging: Midnight is a pathology model that matched the leaders while training on far fewer slides.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Mindfulness-based stress reduction and cognitive therapyestablished: Structured eight-week mindfulness courses reduce anxiety and low mood during and after cancer treatment, with dozens of randomised trials behind them. Guidelines from ASCO and the Society for Integrative Oncology recommend them as a first option alongside,...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Minoxidil for persistent chemotherapy- and endocrine-therapy hair lossemerging: Most hair grows back after chemotherapy, but a minority, especially after docetaxel, are left with thin hair, and tamoxifen and aromatase inhibitors cause gradual thinning. Minoxidil lotion or low-dose tablets, the same treatment used for pattern hair loss,...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Mirai (MIT breast cancer risk from mammograms)emerging: Reads a mammogram to estimate five-year breast cancer risk, consistently across races and devices.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Mistletoe extracts (Iscador, Helixor)phase-2: Injectable mistletoe extracts are the most prescribed complementary cancer treatment in German-speaking Europe. Decades of studies have not shown that they lengthen life; some suggest better quality of life during chemotherapy, but the trials are weak and t...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Molecular glue discovery platformsphase-1: Molecular glues are small molecules that stick two proteins together so the cell destroys one of them. They are smaller and more drug-like than bifunctional degraders.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Money after treatment: what the cost of cancer does once the treatment has finishedestablished: In a United States cohort covering 231,596 people diagnosed between 1995 and 2009, those who filed for bankruptcy after a cancer diagnosis had a mortality hazard ratio of 1.79 against propensity-matched people who did not. In a national survey of people ove...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Monoclonal antibodiesstandard-of-care: Lab-made immune proteins that lock onto one target, either blocking it or flagging the cell for destruction.Open in Atlas onco.cc
MR-guided adaptive radiotherapyestablished: An MR-linac is a radiation machine with an MRI scanner built in, so images taken during setup let the plan be re-optimised in minutes to that day's anatomy. It allows tighter margins and higher doses in pancreatic and prostate cancer, but treatment is slow...Open in Atlas onco.cc
MRD / molecular residual disease testingestablished: An ultra-sensitive blood test after surgery that detects leftover cancer months before a scan would.Open in Atlas onco.cc
MRIstandard-of-care: MRI uses a strong magnet and radio waves, with no ionising radiation, to picture soft tissue in finer contrast than CT, so it is the standard scan for brain tumours, prostate, rectal cancer staging, liver lesions and breast screening in high-risk women. It...Open in Atlas onco.cc
MRI field strengths: 1.5 T, 3 T and 7 Testablished: MRI scanners are sold by the strength of their magnet. 1.5 tesla is the reliable workhorse, 3 tesla gives more signal for prostate, brain and breast imaging, and 7 tesla is a research-grade brain scanner; stronger is not simply better, because artefacts, he...Open in Atlas onco.cc
mRNA and lipid nanoparticle manufacturingphase-3: An mRNA cancer vaccine is made without cells: a DNA template is copied into RNA by an enzyme in a tank, cleaned up, and wrapped in tiny fat bubbles. For personalised vaccines the whole run is done once for each patient, against that patient's own tumour mut...Open in Atlas onco.cc
MSI and mismatch-repair testingstandard-of-care: Tests that show whether a tumour has lost its DNA spell-checker; if so, immunotherapy works unusually well and an inherited syndrome may be present.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Multi-cancer early detection (MCED)phase-3: A single blood test intended to screen for dozens of cancers at once, including ones with no screening today.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Multidisciplinary tumour boardsstandard-of-care: Multidisciplinary tumour boards are regular meetings where surgeons, oncologists, radiologists and pathologists review each patient's case with the full dataset and agree a plan before treatment starts. They are mandatory in the UK and for accreditation in...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Multiparameter flow cytometry MRDstandard-of-care: Flow cytometry MRD counts leukaemia cells in the bone marrow one at a time by their surface proteins, down to one in ten thousand.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Multiparametric prostate MRI (PI-RADS)standard-of-care: Multiparametric prostate MRI combines three scan sequences, scored 1 to 5 under PI-RADS, and is done before a first biopsy in men with a raised PSA. Needles go to suspicious areas and men with a negative scan can often avoid biopsy altogether, but about one...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Multiplex immunofluorescenceestablished: Staining one tumour slide for several proteins in different colours, then using software to count immune and cancer cells and measure how close they are.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Multitarget stool RNA test (ColoSense)approved: A home stool test that reads RNA from cells shed by the bowel lining together with a haemoglobin test; approved in the United States in 2024 as an alternative to stool DNA tests for average-risk screening from age 45.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Muscle and strength after treatment: sarcopenia, cachexia and what rebuildsestablished: Muscle lost during treatment is usually regained with resistance training and enough protein, over months rather than weeks. Muscle lost to cancer cachexia is different: while the cancer is active, training and food slow the loss but rarely reverse it, and...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Music therapy and music medicineestablished: Listening to music, or working with a trained music therapist, reduces anxiety, pain and fatigue during cancer treatment in a Cochrane review of more than 80 trials. The effects are real but modest, and the evidence is of low to moderate certainty because b...Open in Atlas onco.cc
MUSK (Stanford, vision-language pathology)emerging: A model that reads slides and clinical text together to predict who will respond to immunotherapy.Open in Atlas onco.cc

N

N-of-1 and rapid platform trialsemerging: Building a trial around one patient, or letting one trial swap drugs in and out as evidence accumulates.Open in Atlas onco.cc
NAD+ precursors taken by mouthphase-2: NAD+ falls with age, and swallowing a precursor raises it in the blood. That much is established. Whether raising it does anything for a person who has had cancer is not. The one B3 compound with a real cancer result is plain nicotinamide, for preventing sk...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Nails after chemotherapy: lifting, ridges and discolourationemerging: Taxanes lift the nail from its bed, leave transverse ridges that mark each cycle, and discolour it. Reported rates across studies range from none to forty-four per cent. Cooling the hands during the infusion reduced nail damage in a pooled analysis, but the...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Nerve damage from chemotherapy: what recovers, and what helpsestablished: Numbness, tingling and pain in the hands and feet are common on platinum, taxane, vinca and proteasome-inhibitor treatment, and most of it fades. In a meta-analysis of 4,179 patients it was present in 68 per cent in the first month, 60 per cent at three mon...Open in Atlas onco.cc
New short-read sequencing platformsemerging: New short-read sequencing platforms from Ultima Genomics, Element Biosciences, Roche and MGI compete with Illumina by cutting the cost per gigabase, with Ultima claiming a genome under 100 dollars. Cheaper reads make whole-genome tumour-normal sequencing an...Open in Atlas onco.cc
NGS-based MRD (clonoSEQ and molecular MRD)standard-of-care: Sequencing the unique genetic barcode of a patient's leukaemia to find one cancer cell in a million.Open in Atlas onco.cc
NHS Targeted Lung Health Check (lung cancer screening programme)standard-of-care: England's lung screening programme: people aged 55 to 74 who have ever smoked are invited for a risk assessment and, if high risk, a low-dose CT scan, often in a mobile unit in a supermarket car park.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Nicheformer (spatial single-cell)emerging: Nicheformer is a model trained on both dissociated and spatial data so it learns how a cell's neighbourhood shapes it.Open in Atlas onco.cc
NK cell engagersphase-1: Bispecific or trispecific antibodies that hold a natural killer cell against a tumour cell and switch it on, an alternative to T-cell engagers with potentially milder side effects.Open in Atlas onco.cc
NK cell therapy and CAR-NKphase-2: Infusions of natural killer cells from donors or cord blood, sometimes fitted with a CAR, offering an off-the-shelf alternative to CAR-T with less cytokine release.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Norton-Simon hypothesis and dose-dense chemotherapyestablished: Because tumours regrow fastest when small, the best way to finish them is to give the same chemotherapy doses closer together. The idea, from Larry Norton and Richard Simon, was proved in breast cancer by the CALGB 9741 trial and made two-weekly chemotherap...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Nuclear medicine and total-body PET hardwareestablished: Nuclear medicine hardware means the scanners themselves: PET/CT, SPECT/CT, and new total-body PET that images the whole body at once.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Nucleotide Transformer (InstaDeep)emerging: DNA language models trained on thousands of genomes for variant and regulatory prediction.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Nutrition support and cachexia managementestablished: Screening for malnutrition, dietitian-led counselling, supplements and tube or intravenous feeding where indicated, plus treatment of cancer cachexia, the muscle-wasting syndrome that affects up to 80% of advanced patients.Open in Atlas onco.cc
NVIDIA BioNeMoestablished: NVIDIA BioNeMo is a software stack, not a model: GPU-optimised training recipes and inference services on which protein, DNA and single-cell foundation models such as Evo 2, ESM and Geneformer are trained and served. The Arc Institute, Recursion and pharmac...Open in Atlas onco.cc

O

Off-the-shelf cancer vaccinesphase-3: Off-the-shelf cancer vaccines target antigens shared across patients, such as mutant KRAS or HER2 peptides, so they are made in advance rather than per person. Sipuleucel-T is still the only approved therapeutic cancer vaccine in the US; tolerance to self-a...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Oligonucleotide therapeuticsphase-2: Oligonucleotide therapeutics are short synthetic strands of genetic code that silence a specific cancer gene.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Oncofertility and fertility preservationestablished: Protecting the ability to have children before cancer treatment that damages eggs, sperm or the womb: sperm and egg or embryo freezing, ovarian tissue freezing, ovarian shielding and, for some breast cancers, temporary ovarian suppression.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Oncology EHR and real-world data platformsestablished: Databases built from millions of real patient records, used to see how treatments work outside trials and to run studies without new trials.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Oncology EHR modules and treatment pathwaysstandard-of-care: The ordering and record systems oncologists use every day, including built-in treatment pathways that steer drug choice.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Oncology information and record-and-verify systems (ARIA, MOSAIQ)standard-of-care: The software that holds a radiotherapy patient's plan, checks that the machine settings match it before every beam is switched on, and keeps the record of every dose given. Almost every department runs one of two systems.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Oncology nursing and nurse-led carestandard-of-care: Specialist nurses deliver most cancer treatment and much of its safety, education and support; nurse-led clinics, navigation and symptom management improve outcomes and are the backbone of care in low-resource settings.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Oncology nutrition assessment and medical nutrition therapyestablished: Nutrition screening means weighing every patient, asking a few screening questions, and referring those at risk to a dietitian. It is simple, guideline-endorsed, and still not done routinely.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Oncology pharmacy automation and compounding robotsestablished: Robots and closed systems that prepare chemotherapy doses safely, protecting pharmacists from hazardous drugs and patients from errors.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Oncolytic virusesapproved: Viruses engineered to infect and burst cancer cells while leaving normal cells alone, and to alert the immune system in the process.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Optical & fluorescence imagingestablished: Dyes that glow under special light, so surgeons can see tumour edges and nerves in the operating theatre.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Oral cancer visual screeningestablished: A trained health worker looking inside the mouth with a light can find mouth cancer early; in India this cut deaths by a third among people who use tobacco or alcohol.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Oral cryotherapy (ice chips) to prevent mucositisstandard-of-care: Sucking ice chips for half an hour around a bolus dose of fluorouracil or high-dose melphalan roughly halves the risk of painful mouth ulcers. It costs nothing and is recommended in international mucositis guidelines.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Oral SERDsapproved: Oral drugs that destroy the oestrogen receptor rather than just blocking it, working even when the receptor has mutated to escape older hormone therapies.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Oral solid dose manufacturing (tablets and capsules)standard-of-care: Most targeted cancer drugs are tablets. Turning a powder into a tablet that dissolves the same way every time is its own craft, and when patents end the same craft lets generic makers sell the drug for a fraction of the price.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Organoid-guided therapy at scalephase-2: Organoid-guided therapy means routinely growing a piece of each patient's tumour and testing drugs on it before choosing, rather than relying on genetics alone.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Ovarian function after chemotherapy: who recovers, and whenestablished: Whether periods return after chemotherapy depends mostly on age and on which drugs were given. In the one study that recorded bleeding daily, about two thirds of women who stopped bleeding for six months after an anthracycline regimen started again, usually...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Ozone therapyemerging: Ozone is sold to survivors as an infusion of ozonated blood, a rectal insufflation or an injection, for immunity, energy and detoxification. The United States regulation on the subject opens with a sentence worth reading in full: "Ozone is a toxic gas with...Open in Atlas onco.cc

P

Palliative radiotherapystandard-of-care: Short courses of radiation, often a single treatment, to relieve pain from bone metastases, stop bleeding, open blocked airways or protect the spinal cord. Among the most cost-effective treatments in cancer.Open in Atlas onco.cc
PARP inhibitorsapproved: Pills that block a DNA repair backup, killing cancer cells that already lost their main repair system (BRCA).Open in Atlas onco.cc
PARP PETphase-2: A PET tracer that measures how much of the DNA repair enzyme PARP a tumour has, to predict response to PARP inhibitors.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Parsortix label-free circulating tumour cell harvestapproved: A microfluidic cassette that traps cancer cells from blood by their size and stiffness rather than a surface marker, then releases them alive for testing; the first such device cleared in the United States, for metastatic breast cancer.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Partial nephrectomy, ablation & active surveillance of small renal massesstandard-of-care: Most small kidney tumours found on scans grow slowly. Options range from watching them, to freezing or heating them, to removing just the tumour and keeping the kidney.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Partners and relationships after cancer: what the divorce data actually showestablished: The widely repeated claim that a marriage is six times more likely to end when the woman is the patient comes from one prospective cohort of 515 people. The largest study of the question, 134,435 married Finnish women followed for a median of 17 married yea...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Pathology & radiology foundation modelsemerging: Pathology and radiology foundation models are AI networks pretrained without labels on over a million slides or scans (Virchow used 1.5 million), then adapted with small task heads to predict mutations, prognosis or treatment response from routine images. T...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Patient digital twinsemerging: A digital twin is a computer model of one patient's tumour and body, updated with each scan and blood test, used to forecast how the disease will respond to each option before it is tried.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Patient positioning and surface guidance systems (AlignRT, Catalyst, ExacTrac Dynamic)established: Cameras that watch the patient's skin in three dimensions, robotic couches and moulded shells that hold the body still, so each radiotherapy dose lands where the plan says without tattoos and with the beam paused if the patient moves.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Patient-derived organoidsestablished: Patient-derived organoids are miniature 3D versions of a patient's tumour grown in the lab.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Patient-derived xenograftsestablished: A patient-derived xenograft is a patient's tumour grown in a mouse, used to test drugs before they reach people.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Payload-linker synthesis (high-potency API)established: Payload-linker synthesis makes the cytotoxic small molecules inside ADCs (exatecan, MMAE, DM1, PBD dimers), whose occupational exposure limits sit in the nanogram range, in facilities built so a speck of dust cannot harm a worker. A handful of licensed site...Open in Atlas onco.cc
PDAC organoid pharmacotypingemerging: Growing a patient's pancreatic tumour as mini-organs in a dish and testing chemotherapies on them to pick the regimen most likely to work.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Peer support and support groupsestablished: Meeting others in the same situation reduces distress and isolation, and randomised trials of supportive-expressive groups show better mood and pain coping. The once-famous claim that support groups lengthen survival did not hold up in a larger trial.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Pelvic floor rehabilitation after prostate and rectal surgery and after pelvic radiotherapyestablished: Pelvic floor exercises are offered to almost every man after prostate surgery, and the largest randomised trial found formal one-to-one training made no difference at twelve months: 76 per cent of treated men were still leaking against 77 per cent of contro...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Pencil-beam scanning and intensity-modulated proton therapyestablished: Modern proton machines paint the tumour spot by spot with a magnetically steered pencil beam, so the dose can be shaped in three dimensions and the proton's stop-point is put to full use.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Peptide receptor radionuclide therapy (PRRT)approved: A radioactive version of the hormone mimic used for the scan; it homes to neuroendocrine tumour cells and irradiates them from inside.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Peptide-drug & small-molecule-drug conjugatesapproved: Like an ADC but with a small targeting peptide instead of an antibody, so it penetrates tumours faster and is cheaper to make.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Percutaneous hepatic perfusion (chemosaturation)approved: Isolating the liver's circulation with catheters and balloons so that high-dose melphalan can be pumped through it and filtered out before it reaches the rest of the body; approved in 2023 for eye melanoma that has spread to the liver.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Personalised neoantigen (mRNA) vaccinesphase-3: A vaccine made for one patient, encoding the unique mutations in their own tumour, to train the immune system to hunt it.Open in Atlas onco.cc
PET (positron emission tomography)standard-of-care: A scan that shows where a radioactive tracer accumulates, so it images what tumours are doing rather than what they look like.Open in Atlas onco.cc
PET tracer manufacturing and distributionstandard-of-care: Making PSMA, FDG, and new tracers under drug-manufacturing rules and delivering them daily.Open in Atlas onco.cc
PET-adapted (response-adapted) therapystandard-of-care: Scan after two cycles of chemotherapy; if the tumour has gone dark, give less treatment, and if not, give more. Hodgkin lymphoma pioneered this.Open in Atlas onco.cc
PET/CTstandard-of-care: PET and CT in one machine, so hot spots on the PET are pinned to exact locations on the CT.Open in Atlas onco.cc
PET/MRIestablished: PET combined with MRI instead of CT, giving biology plus the best soft-tissue detail, at lower radiation dose.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Pharmacogenomic testing before chemotherapyestablished: Testing a patient's inherited genes before certain chemotherapies to spot people who cannot break the drug down and would suffer severe, sometimes fatal, side effects.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic modellingestablished: Equations that describe how a drug's concentration rises and falls in the body and how that concentration translates into effect and toxicity; the reason doses are given per square metre, why some drugs are infused over days, and how children's doses are set.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Phenom-2 and Recursion OSemerging: A model trained on billions of cell microscopy images to read what a drug or gene knockout does to a cell.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Phikon / Phikon-v2 (Owkin)emerging: Owkin's open pathology models trained on TCGA and its federated hospital network.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Photobiomodulation (low-level laser) for oral mucositisestablished: Shining low-power red or near-infrared light on the inside of the mouth before and during treatment prevents severe mouth ulcers in people having head and neck radiotherapy or high-dose chemotherapy for transplant. Mucositis guidelines recommend it, though...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Photodynamic therapy lasers and light sourcesapproved: Red or near-infrared lasers and lamps that switch on a light-sensitive drug sitting in a tumour. Each drug has its own colour, so the machine is matched to the drug: skin lamps for sun damage, fibre-optic lasers for the oesophagus, lung and bladder, and a n...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Photoimmunotherapy & photodynamic therapyapproved: An antibody carries a light-sensitive dye to the tumour; shining near-infrared light then bursts the cells.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Photon-counting CTemerging: A new kind of CT detector that counts every X-ray photon and records its energy, giving sharper pictures at lower dose and colour-like tissue information from every scan.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Photothermal (plasmonic) nanoparticle ablationphase-2: Gold nanoshells that accumulate in a tumour and cook it when a near-infrared laser is shone on them.Open in Atlas onco.cc
PI3K, AKT and mTOR inhibitorsapproved: Drugs against one of the most commonly mutated growth pathways in cancer, now used with hormone therapy in breast cancer and in kidney and neuroendocrine tumours, with high blood sugar as the shared side effect.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Plasmid DNA and mRNA raw-material manufacturingestablished: Plasmid DNA and mRNA raw materials are the DNA templates and enzymes behind viral vectors and mRNA vaccines. They are invisible to patients but decisive for supply.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Platelet-rich plasma for hair after cancer treatmentphase-2: Blood is spun to concentrate platelets and injected into the scalp. It is sold widely for hair loss and is expensive. The one randomised study in people treated for cancer injected one half of the scalp and left the other half alone: both halves improved by...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Platelet-rich plasma for survivorsphase-2: Platelet-rich plasma is the person's own blood, spun down and injected back. It is sold for hair, skin and vaginal dryness after treatment. The two trials that have actually been run in cancer survivors are small, and the better designed of the two found no...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Platinum agentsstandard-of-care: Platinum agents such as cisplatin and carboplatin work by crosslinking DNA. They are curative in testicular cancer and central to lung, ovarian, bladder, head and neck, and TNBC treatment.Open in Atlas onco.cc
PLUTO (PathAI)emerging: PLUTO is PathAI's compact pathology foundation model, a vision transformer pretrained at several magnifications on 195 million tiles from 158,000 slides, so one network serves slide-level and biomarker quantification tasks at whatever resolution each needs....Open in Atlas onco.cc
Point-of-care and decentralised cell manufacturingemerging: Making CAR-T cells at or near the hospital instead of shipping cells to a central factory and back.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Polygenic risk scores for canceremerging: A score built from hundreds of common gene variants that says whether your inherited risk of a cancer is higher or lower than average, now being tested as a way to decide who is screened and how often.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Post-traumatic growth: what people report, and what the measurement actually capturesestablished: Many people say cancer changed them for the better, and that report is real. What the standard questionnaire measures is less clear: when researchers compared what people said had changed with what had actually changed on the same measures taken before and...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Post-traumatic stress after cancer: what is measured, and how much of it is measurementemerging: Post-traumatic stress disorder is commoner after cancer than in matched controls, with a pooled odds ratio of 1.66 across 11 studies, and the meta-analysis authors say some of that may come from publication bias. How much is reported depends on whether a cl...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Pre-analytics: blood-collection tubes and tissue fixationstandard-of-care: The tubes and fixatives that keep a sample stable between the patient and the lab. Unglamorous, but they decide whether a liquid biopsy or PD-L1 stain is trustworthy.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Prehabilitation before cancer surgeryemerging: Prehabilitation is a few weeks of structured exercise, nutrition and psychological preparation between diagnosis and surgery to make patients fitter for the operation and speed recovery.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Preventing graft-versus-host disease, and what prevention costsstandard-of-care: Every donor transplant includes drugs to stop the new immune system attacking the body. A randomised trial in 2023 changed the usual choice: cyclophosphamide after the transplant, with tacrolimus and mycophenolate, worked better than the older combination....Open in Atlas onco.cc
PRO-CTCAE: side effects graded by the person having themestablished: Clinicians have always graded side effects themselves, and they systematically under-record them. PRO-CTCAE is the matching set of questions asked of the patient instead, in plain language, about how often a symptom happened, how bad it was and how much it...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Probiotics for chemotherapy and radiotherapy diarrhoeaphase-2: Probiotic supplements (Lactobacillus, Bifidobacterium) may reduce diarrhoea during pelvic radiotherapy for cervical, rectal and prostate cancer and some chemotherapy, but a 2018 Cochrane review rated the evidence low certainty and strains differ between tri...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Probiotics, antibiotics and stewardship around immunotherapyemerging: Antibiotics in the weeks before immunotherapy are linked with worse outcomes, and shop-bought probiotics may not help and might hurt. Avoiding both where possible is a low-cost precaution.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Programmable DNA-targeting therapeuticspreclinical: Programmable DNA-targeting therapeutics are an experimental idea: a drug that reads a cell's DNA, recognises a cancer-specific sequence, and kills only cells that carry it. Change the guide, and the same drug becomes a new drug.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Proliferation-invasion (reaction-diffusion) models of gliomaemerging: Gliomas grow by both dividing and migrating through the brain, and a two-parameter equation fitted to a patient's MRI scans estimates how far invisible cells have spread, which can guide how much brain to irradiate and how fast the tumour will grow.Open in Atlas onco.cc
PROMIS: the item banks that let a short questionnaire be preciseestablished: Instead of a fixed questionnaire, PROMIS is a library of calibrated questions for things like fatigue, pain, anxiety, depression and physical function, built so that a computer can pick the next question based on the last answer and reach a precise score in...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Prophylactic cranial irradiation vs MRI surveillanceestablished: Small-cell lung cancer spreads to the brain so often that doctors used to irradiate the whole brain pre-emptively. Regular MRI scans are now challenging that practice.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Prospective surveillance: looking for the problem before it becomes a disabilityemerging: The usual model waits for a patient to complain, by which time an arm has been swollen for a year. The prospective surveillance model measures function before treatment starts and again at set points afterwards, so a small problem is found while it is still...Open in Atlas onco.cc
PROTACs & molecular glues (targeted protein degradation)approved: Instead of blocking a protein, these drugs tag it for the cell's own garbage disposal, removing it entirely.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Protecting the heart during anthracycline treatment: dexrazoxane, beta blockers and ACE inhibitorsestablished: Dexrazoxane, given with the chemotherapy, cuts clinical heart failure in adults by about four fifths in pooled trials without reducing how well the chemotherapy works. Beta blockers and blood-pressure drugs given preventively protect the ejection fraction b...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Proteomics & phosphoproteomicsemerging: Measuring the proteins in a tumour, which is what drugs actually hit, rather than the genes that encode them.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Proteomics instruments and affinity platformsestablished: Machines that measure thousands of proteins at once from tissue or blood, used to find drug targets and early-detection markers.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Proton arc therapyphase-1: Rotating the proton beam continuously around the patient instead of firing from a few fixed angles, to spread the entrance dose and sharpen the target dose.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Proton therapyestablished: Radiation using protons, which stop inside the tumour instead of passing through, so tissue behind it gets no dose.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Proton therapy machines: cyclotrons, synchrotrons and single-room systemsestablished: Proton centres are built around one of three accelerators, a cyclotron, a synchrotron or a compact synchrocyclotron, feeding one or several treatment rooms through magnets and a rotating gantry the size of a house. Single-room systems have cut the price of...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Prov-GigaPath (Microsoft, Providence)emerging: An open pathology model trained on 1.3 billion image tiles from a US health system, modelling whole slides at gigapixel scale.Open in Atlas onco.cc
PSA and MRI-first prostate cancer screeningemerging: Whether men should be screened for prostate cancer is still debated; the modern approach uses a PSA blood test followed by an MRI scan, which finds the cancers that matter while leaving harmless ones alone.Open in Atlas onco.cc
PSK (Krestin) mushroom polysaccharide as adjuvant therapyapproved: PSK, a protein-bound polysaccharide from the turkey tail mushroom, has been an approved adjuvant cancer drug in Japan since 1977. Meta-analyses of Japanese randomised trials in stomach and bowel cancer found a modest survival benefit added to chemotherapy,...Open in Atlas onco.cc
PSMA PETstandard-of-care: A prostate-cancer-specific PET scan that finds spread far earlier than CT or bone scan, and tells you whether a matched radioactive drug will work.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Psycho-oncology and distress screeningestablished: Psycho-oncology recognises and treats the anxiety, depression, fear of recurrence and existential distress that affect a third of people with cancer, using screening, psychotherapy adapted to cancer, and medication.Open in Atlas onco.cc

Q

Quality of life after transplant and cell therapyestablished: Most people who come through a transplant or CAR-T report, years later, a quality of life close to that of people who never had one. Underneath that, a substantial minority live with fatigue, anxiety, low mood or trouble concentrating, and the strongest pre...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Quantitative imaging biomarkers (RECIST, PERCIST, SUV, ADC)standard-of-care: The numbers pulled from scans that decide whether a cancer is shrinking, growing or dead: tumour diameters for RECIST, sugar uptake on PET, water movement on MRI; they run every trial and most clinic decisions, and they are only as good as the way the scan...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Quantitative systems pharmacology (QSP)established: Mechanistic computer models that join a drug's pharmacology to the biology of the tumour and the body, used by developers and regulators to pick doses, predict combinations and explain why a trial failed.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Quantum-dot and molecular ultrasound imaging agentspreclinical: Brighter, longer-lasting fluorescent particles and targeted microbubbles that make tumours visible during surgery or on an ultrasound scan.Open in Atlas onco.cc

R

RAD51 foci assay (functional HRD test)emerging: A microscope test on an ordinary tumour biopsy that counts RAD51 repair spots in dividing cells; few spots means the tumour cannot repair DNA by homologous recombination right now, which is what PARP inhibitors exploit.Open in Atlas onco.cc
RadFM (generalist radiology foundation model)emerging: An open generalist model that answers questions about 2D and 3D scans.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Radio-antibody & radio-ADCphase-2: Attaching a radioactive atom to an antibody, so an ADC's targeting is used to deliver radiation instead of chemotherapy.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Radiodynamic therapy and radiosensitising nanoparticlesphase-2: Nanoparticles that turn ordinary radiotherapy X-rays into a much bigger dose exactly where they sit.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Radioembolisation (TARE / SIRT, yttrium-90)established: Millions of tiny radioactive glass or resin beads are injected into the liver artery, lodging in the tumour and irradiating it from within.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Radiogenomics: predicting radiation sensitivity from genesemerging: Using a tumour's gene expression or a patient's inherited variants to predict who needs more dose, who needs less, and who is at risk of severe side effects.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Radioiodine therapy and whole-body iodine scanningstandard-of-care: Using the thyroid's natural appetite for iodine to image and treat thyroid cancer with a radioactive form of it. The oldest theranostic, and now used more selectively than it was.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Radioligand dosimetryestablished: Measuring, from scans taken after each dose, how much radiation a radioligand actually delivers to the tumour and to kidneys and marrow, so treatment can be personalised.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Radioligand plus DNA-repair inhibitor combinationsphase-1: Adding a PARP or ATR inhibitor to a radioactive drug so the tumour cannot repair the damage the radiation causes.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Radioligand therapy (beta emitters)approved: A drug that finds tumour cells and carries a radioactive atom that irradiates them from inside the body.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Radiomicsemerging: Turning ordinary CT, MRI and PET scans into hundreds of measured features of shape and texture that computers relate to tumour biology and outcome.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Radionuclide generators and cold kitsstandard-of-care: Bench-top devices that 'milk' a short-lived isotope from a long-lived parent, plus vials of ready-to-label ligand. How most hospitals make PSMA and somatostatin PET tracers without a cyclotron.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Radiopharmaceutical GMP and releasing a drug that decaysstandard-of-care: A radioactive medicine loses activity every hour, so it is made to order, tested in hours and often injected before the sterility test has finished. The rules for that are different from ordinary drugs, and the handful of plants that make lutetium therapies...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Radiopharmacy and cyclotron networksstandard-of-care: The factories and courier routes that make and deliver short-lived radioactive tracers to hospitals within hours.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Radioprotectors and normal-tissue sparing drugsestablished: Drugs that shield healthy tissue from radiation: amifostine to protect salivary glands, palifermin for mouth ulcers, and newer agents aimed at the gut, lung and skin.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Radiosensitisersestablished: Drugs given with radiotherapy to make tumour cells easier to kill: cisplatin in cervical and head and neck cancer, temozolomide in glioblastoma, nimorazole for hypoxic tumours, and a new generation aimed at DNA repair.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Radiotherapy access and the global machine gapestablished: About half the people who need radiotherapy will need it as part of curing their cancer, yet many countries have one machine per several million people or none at all. Closing the gap is one of the highest-return investments in cancer care.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Radiotherapy QA phantoms and dosimeters (Sun Nuclear, IBA Dosimetry, PTW)standard-of-care: The measuring instruments that prove a radiotherapy machine gives the dose it claims: ionisation chambers, detector arrays, water tanks and plastic stand-in patients, checked every day, month and year and before every complex plan is delivered.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Radiotherapy treatment planning and QA softwarestandard-of-care: The software that calculates exactly how radiation beams should be shaped and checks the machine delivered it.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Rapamycin and mTOR inhibition for ageingphase-2: Rapamycin extends life in every species it has been properly tested in, which is why people take it off-label. In humans there are two randomised results worth knowing: a related drug improved the flu vaccine response in older people by about a fifth, and a...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Rebuilding an immune system: the timeline, lineage by lineageestablished: After a transplant the immune system comes back in a fixed order, and the order explains most of what follows. Neutrophils in two to four weeks, natural killer cells within a month, B cells over several months to a year, and T cells last and slowest. Adults...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Rebuilding the immune system after treatmentstandard-of-care: Chemotherapy, a transplant and CAR-T empty out the immune system, and rebuilding it takes months to years. Blood counts come back before protection does: the antibodies built up over a lifetime, from childhood jabs and from infections, are largely lost afte...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Recovery after pelvic exenterationstandard-of-care: Removing the pelvic organs together can cure a recurrence that nothing else will, at the cost of one or two stomas and a long recovery. About half of patients have a major complication within 90 days. Overall quality of life scores recover by six to twelve...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Red and processed meat reductionestablished: Processed meat (bacon, ham, sausages) is classed by IARC as a definite cause of bowel cancer and red meat as a probable one, with about 18% higher risk per 50 g of processed meat a day. One person's extra lifetime risk is a few percentage points, but 5 to 1...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Reference laboratories and companion-diagnostic testingstandard-of-care: The big labs that run most biomarker tests, and the reagent makers whose stains decide who gets a drug.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Referral to rehabilitation: the service most people who need it never seeestablished: Physiotherapy, occupational therapy, speech and swallowing therapy and lymphoedema services are the treatments for most of what cancer treatment leaves behind. The measured use of them after cancer treatment is a small fraction of the measured need, and the...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Reflexologyemerging: Reflexology is foot massage guided by a map of the body that has no anatomical basis. Small trials report short-lived relaxation and pain relief similar to any gentle foot massage; guidelines list it as an option for pain only with low confidence.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Reiki, healing touch and other energy therapiesconcept: Reiki and similar practices involve a practitioner holding hands on or near the body to channel an 'energy' that has never been detected. Trials show relaxation similar to sham sessions; they are harmless as rest, but they treat nothing.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Relaxation training and guided imageryestablished: Progressive muscle relaxation, breathing exercises and guided imagery are simple techniques that reduce anxiety and treatment-related distress during chemotherapy and radiotherapy. Guidelines say they may be offered, and audio versions cost nothing.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Remote afterloaders for HDR brachytherapystandard-of-care: The machine that makes modern brachytherapy safe for staff: a shielded safe holding one tiny, intensely radioactive source on a cable, which it drives out through tubes into applicators inside the patient, dwells at programmed positions, and pulls back befo...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Research reactors for medical isotopes (Mo-99, Lu-177, I-131)standard-of-care: Most of the world's therapeutic and scanning isotopes are made by putting targets into about half a dozen ageing research reactors and flying the product out within days. When two reactors were down at once in 2009 and 2010, hospitals worldwide ran short of...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Residual disease kinetics (BCR-ABL halving and ctDNA slopes)established: The speed at which a molecular marker falls during treatment predicts outcome better than a single level: BCR-ABL halving time in chronic myeloid leukaemia and circulating tumour DNA slopes in solid tumours are now used to judge response within weeks.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Resistance training and protein for cachexia and sarcopeniaemerging: Lifting weights and eating enough protein is the only treatment shown to build muscle in people with cancer wasting, but most are too unwell to do it alone and the trials are small.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Respiratory gating and tumour tracking systems (RPM, ABC, Calypso, Synchrony)established: Hardware that copes with tumours that move when the patient breathes: belts and cameras that switch the beam on only in part of the breathing cycle, devices that hold the breath, and implanted beacons or X-ray tracking that let the beam follow the tumour.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Respiratory motion management (4D-CT, gating, breath-hold, tracking)established: Ways of dealing with tumours that move as the patient breathes: image the motion, treat only in part of the breathing cycle, hold the breath, or chase the tumour with the beam.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Revaccination after transplant: the schedules, and where the UK and the US differstandard-of-care: A transplant erases the protection built up by a lifetime of vaccinations, including childhood ones, and it has to be rebuilt. Published schedules exist, the vaccines are free at the point of use in the NHS, and the usual failure is that nobody writes the p...Open in Atlas onco.cc
RFdiffusion / RFdiffusion2 and ProteinMPNN (Baker Lab)emerging: The tools that design entirely new proteins to bind a chosen target, now used for cancer binders and antibodies.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Ring-gantry linacs (Halcyon, Ethos)established: A radiotherapy machine built like a CT scanner: the accelerator spins inside an enclosed ring, must image the patient before every dose, and treats fast. Ethos adds software that redraws the plan to the anatomy of the day while the patient lies on the couch.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Risk-reducing and opportunistic salpingectomyestablished: Removing the fallopian tubes, where most ovarian cancer starts, during other pelvic surgery or in women at inherited risk.Open in Atlas onco.cc
RNA sequencing & expression profilingestablished: Measuring which genes a tumour is actively using, which reveals its subtype and finds gene fusions.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Robotic & minimally invasive surgerystandard-of-care: Surgeons operate through small incisions using robotic arms with tremor-free precision and 3D vision.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Robotic and navigational bronchoscopyestablished: A robot-guided flexible scope that reaches small lung nodules through the airways to biopsy them without a needle through the chest wall.Open in Atlas onco.cc

S

SBRT / SABR (stereotactic radiotherapy)standard-of-care: Stereotactic body radiotherapy converges multiple beams with sub-millimetre accuracy to deliver tumour-destroying doses in one to five outpatient sessions, doing the job of surgery for inoperable early lung cancer and for metastases in liver, spine and brai...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Scalp care during and after cancer treatmentestablished: A bare scalp burns in sun it has never met, loses heat fast in cold, and is more easily irritated while treatment is going on. The measures are small and free, and they are the part of hair loss a person can act on from the first week.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Scalp cooling (cold caps: DigniCap, Paxman)established: A tightly fitted cap chilled to a few degrees above freezing, worn before, during and after each chemotherapy infusion, narrows the blood vessels of the scalp so less drug reaches the hair roots. In a randomised trial about half of women on taxane-based che...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Scars, stiffness and contracture: shoulders, necks and jawsestablished: Scar tissue shortens as it matures, and across a joint that means lost movement: a shoulder that will not reach a shelf, a neck that will not turn, a mouth that will not open. Silicone gel flattens and softens the scar itself in randomised trials, and stret...Open in Atlas onco.cc
scFoundation (BioMap)emerging: scFoundation is a 100-million-parameter model trained on 50 million cells, from China's BioMap.Open in Atlas onco.cc
scGPTemerging: A GPT-style model for single-cell data that predicts cell types, perturbation responses, and gene networks.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Scrambler therapy (Calmare) for chemotherapy nerve painemerging: A surface electrical device that is said to replace pain signals with signals the brain reads as normal. People treated with it often feel better, but in the only trial that compared it with a dummy device there was no difference between the two, so what is...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Screening for distress: what the thermometer can and cannot doestablished: The one-question distress thermometer is good at ruling depression out and poor at ruling it in: pooled across 38 analyses of 6,414 patients, sensitivity 78.4 per cent, specificity 66.8 per cent, and only 34.2 per cent who screened positive were depressed....Open in Atlas onco.cc
Second cancers after allogeneic transplantestablished: People who have had a donor transplant develop new, unrelated cancers about twice as often as people of the same age, and by fifteen years about three times as often. Radiation in the conditioning matters most for those irradiated young, and chronic GvHD ra...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Second cancers after childhood cancer: the risk by treatment, and why it is fallingestablished: The largest late risk a childhood cancer survivor carries. Thirty years after diagnosis, 20.5 per cent of survivors treated in the 1970s and early 1980s had developed a subsequent neoplasm. The fifteen-year risk of a second malignancy has since fallen from...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Secondary T-cell malignancy after CAR-T, and what the FDA's 2024 action actually saysestablished: In 2024 the US regulator added a warning to every approved CAR-T product about T-cell cancers after treatment. It says the risk applies to the class, that these can appear within weeks, and that patients should be monitored for life. It does not say CAR-T c...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Self-amplifying and circular RNA therapeuticsphase-1: RNA drugs that copy themselves inside the cell, or are made as a loop so they last longer. Both aim to get more protein from a smaller dose.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Senescent cells and p16 after chemotherapyemerging: Chemotherapy pushes cells into senescence: they stop dividing but stay alive and keep releasing inflammatory signals. The usual marker, p16INK4a in blood T cells, rises sharply during treatment and is still raised a year later. In one study the rise matched...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Senolytics after cancer treatmentphase-2: Senolytics are drugs meant to kill the worn-out cells that chemotherapy leaves behind. The idea is good and the animal work is striking. The human evidence is four small trials in other diseases, none in cancer survivors, and the one properly randomised tri...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Senolytics and senescence-directed therapypreclinical: Chemotherapy leaves behind zombie cells that will not divide but poison their neighbours. Senolytics aim to clear them.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Sentinel lymph node biopsystandard-of-care: Removing just the first lymph node a tumour drains to, instead of all of them, to check for spread.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Serum tumour markers: proper use and misusestandard-of-care: The classic cancer blood tests, each a protein or hormone that some tumours pour into the blood; they are excellent for following a known cancer and useless or harmful as general screening, because nearly all of them are raised by common benign conditions too.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Services built for teenagers and young adults, and what the national evaluation foundestablished: England built specialist units for 13 to 24 year olds and then evaluated them nationally, which almost no health system does. The results were mixed enough that young people were asked to interpret them, and they pointed out that three years of follow-up wa...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Sexual function and intimacy after cancer, for both sexesestablished: Sexual difficulty is among the losses people report most after cancer treatment and among the least often asked about. The guideline says a member of the care team should raise it, and that counselling should be offered to everyone. The treatments are real...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Shark cartilage (AE-941, Neovastat)negative: The idea that sharks do not get cancer (they do) launched a supplement industry. Two randomised trials, including a large phase 3 in lung cancer, found that shark cartilage extract does nothing for survival, and the trade contributed to shark population dec...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Single-cell & spatial profilingemerging: Reading the genes of each individual cell, and mapping where each cell sits in the tumour.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Single-use bioprocessing systemsestablished: Modern biologics plants grow cells in giant sterile plastic bags instead of steel tanks, throwing the bag away after each batch. It makes plants faster to build and switch, but it ties the whole industry to a few bag and filter makers.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Site-specific conjugation & linker chemistryestablished: Site-specific conjugation and linker chemistry decide exactly where and how many payloads attach to the antibody, which determines how safe and effective an ADC is.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Skin cancer screening (visual skin examination)emerging: Checking the whole skin for suspicious moles finds melanomas earlier, but no trial has yet shown that screening everyone saves lives, so most countries target people at high risk.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Skin during and after radiotherapy: dressings, steroids and what lastsestablished: Skin reactions in the treated area peak around the end of radiotherapy and heal. A thin silicone film applied from the first day cut moderate or severe reactions from 45.6 to 15.5 per cent in a randomised trial in breast cancer, and an international guideli...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Sleep after cancer: how common insomnia is, how long it lasts, and the treatment that worksstandard-of-care: In 962 people interviewed six times over 18 months after surgery for a first non-metastatic cancer, 59 per cent had insomnia symptoms at the start, 28 per cent met criteria for an insomnia syndrome, and 36 per cent still had symptoms at 18 months. A short c...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Sleep and circadian interventions in canceremerging: Half of people with cancer sleep badly, so sleep and body-clock interventions matter. Talking therapy for insomnia works well and is under-used; whether fixing sleep or body-clock disruption changes the cancer itself is unproven.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Sleeping tablets after cancer: what they do and what they do notestablished: The American Academy of Sleep Medicine's guideline on drugs for chronic insomnia rates every one of its recommendations as weak, suggests eight drugs and suggests against six more, including melatonin, trazodone, diphenhydramine and valerian. In cancer spec...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Small-molecule API synthesisstandard-of-care: Before a tablet or a vial exists, the active drug itself has to be made: many chemical steps in reactors, or extraction from a plant, at a handful of factories most patients never hear of. When one of those factories stops, whole cancer drugs disappear.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Small-molecule kinase inhibitorsstandard-of-care: Pills that block the specific enzyme a cancer relies on. Imatinib in 2001 proved a cancer could be switched off by design.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Smoking cessation in cancer patientsestablished: Stopping smoking after a cancer diagnosis improves survival, reduces treatment complications and second cancers, and is the single most effective supportive intervention that oncology services still routinely fail to deliver.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Solid stress and tumour mechanobiology modelsemerging: Growing tumours compress themselves and their surroundings; models of this solid stress explain collapsed vessels, poor drug delivery and stiff stroma, and point to drugs that soften the tumour so treatment can get in.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Somatostatin receptor PET (68Ga/64Cu-DOTATATE)standard-of-care: A PET scan using a radioactive hormone mimic that lights up neuroendocrine tumours and shows whether the matching radioactive treatment will work.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Sonodynamic therapyphase-2: A drug that does nothing until ultrasound hits it, then kills the cells that took it up. Being tested in brain tumours because sound reaches where light cannot.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Soy foods and breast cancerestablished: For years women with breast cancer were told to avoid soy because it contains plant oestrogens. Large studies show moderate soy food intake is safe and may slightly reduce recurrence, including on tamoxifen.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Spatial biology instrumentsemerging: Spatial biology instruments are machines that map which genes and proteins are active in each part of a tumour slice.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Spatial transcriptomicsemerging: Methods that read which genes are switched on in each spot or cell of a tumour slice while keeping the tissue's geography, so scientists can see how cancer, immune and stromal cells sit next to one another.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Spatial-omics-guided treatment selectionemerging: Choosing treatment from a map of where each cell type sits in the tumour, not just from a list of its mutations.Open in Atlas onco.cc
SPECT & bone scanstandard-of-care: SPECT and the bone scan are an older type of nuclear scan, still used for bone metastases and to check where a radioactive drug went after treatment.Open in Atlas onco.cc
SPECT/CTstandard-of-care: A gamma camera with a CT scanner bolted on, so a hot spot on a bone scan or a sentinel-node scan is pinned to the exact bone or lymph node, and the dose from a radioactive drug can be measured after treatment.Open in Atlas onco.cc
St John's wort: an interaction to avoidestablished: St John's wort is a herbal antidepressant whose active ingredient hyperforin switches on the liver enzyme CYP3A4 and the P-glycoprotein pump, cutting blood levels of irinotecan's active metabolite by 42% and imatinib by about a third. It is contraindicated...Open in Atlas onco.cc
State (Arc Institute perturbation model)emerging: Predicts how cells will respond to a drug or gene knockout, trained on over 100 million perturbed cells.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Stem cell clinics and stem cell tourismemerging: Clinics at home and abroad sell stem cell infusions and injections to people finishing cancer treatment. The FDA has recorded blindness, tumour formation and infections from these products, and says plainly that if you are being charged for one outside a cl...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Stereotactic ablative radiotherapy for oligometastatic diseaseemerging: Treating every visible metastasis with ablative doses when there are only a few, on the idea that some patients with limited spread can still be controlled or cured.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Stereotactic radiosurgery (Gamma Knife, CyberKnife, linac SRS)established: A single very high dose, or a few doses, aimed at a small brain or spine target with millimetre precision, replacing whole-brain radiotherapy for most brain metastases.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Sterile fill-finish and lyophilisationstandard-of-care: Sterile fill-finish is putting the finished drug into vials under sterile conditions. It is a frequent cause of shortages when capacity is tight.Open in Atlas onco.cc
STING & innate immune agonistsphase-2: Drugs that trigger the cell's built-in 'virus alarm' inside tumours to summon immune cells.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Stoma reversal after rectal cancer surgery: who gets the bowel joined up againstandard-of-care: Most temporary stomas made to protect a join in the bowel are reversed, and a meaningful minority are not. In a series of 639 patients having sphincter-sparing surgery, 11.9 per cent still had a stoma two years later; the main reasons were the cancer progre...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Strain echocardiography (global longitudinal strain)established: An ordinary heart ultrasound analysed by software that tracks how far each segment of heart muscle shortens with every beat; a fall of more than about fifteen per cent from baseline warns of chemotherapy heart damage months before the usual ejection fractio...Open in Atlas onco.cc
STRIDE DNA break detection (intoDNA)emerging: STRIDE is a microscope test that lights up individual broken DNA strands inside cells, so a laboratory can count how much DNA damage a tumour carries or a drug causes, cell by cell.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Structural biology infrastructure (cryo-EM, synchrotrons, AlphaFold)established: Structural biology infrastructure is the microscopes, X-ray sources, and prediction models that show what a cancer protein looks like so chemists can design a drug to fit it.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Structured exercise programmes after curative treatmentestablished: A supervised, coached exercise programme for three years after bowel cancer treatment cut recurrence and death in a large randomised trial. It is the first lifestyle intervention proven to work like an adjuvant drug.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Superficial and orthovoltage radiotherapy for skin cancerestablished: Low-energy X-rays that stop within a few millimetres, used to cure basal and squamous cell skin cancers where surgery would scar or is not wanted.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Supplements sold for hair growth after cancer treatmentnegative: Biotin, marine-protein and multi-ingredient capsules are advertised directly to people whose hair has thinned after treatment. No randomised trial of any of them has been run in chemotherapy or endocrine-therapy hair loss. High-dose biotin also distorts hos...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Surface-guided radiotherapy (SGRT)established: Cameras track the patient's skin surface in three dimensions during treatment, replacing tattoos and pausing the beam if the patient moves.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Surgery for gallbladder cancer: simple versus radical cholecystectomy, re-resection and lymphadenectomystandard-of-care: The operation that can cure gallbladder cancer: the gallbladder bed in the liver (segments IVb and V) is removed with the lymph nodes along the bile duct and hepatic artery, either at the first operation or as a second operation after a cancer is found by c...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Surgical robots: da Vinci, Hugo, Versius and single-port systemsestablished: The surgeon sits at a console and moves wristed instruments through keyhole ports while a 3D camera shows the inside of the body magnified. Intuitive's da Vinci has dominated for two decades; Medtronic's Hugo and CMR's Versius are the first serious rivals,...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Survival after transplant, and why the curve never quite rejoins the populationestablished: If you are alive and free of disease two years after a donor transplant, around nine in ten are alive five years later and 85 per cent at ten years. The death rate among transplant survivors stays higher than in people of the same age who never had one, for...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Survivorship care and late-effects surveillanceestablished: Organised follow-up for the 18 million US and 50+ million global cancer survivors: watching for recurrence and second cancers, managing long-term side effects such as heart damage, infertility, neuropathy and fatigue, and helping people return to work and l...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Swallowing therapy around head and neck radiotherapyestablished: Keeping food going down the throat during radiotherapy, and doing swallowing exercises through it, both independently predict being back on a normal diet afterwards. In 595 patients, those who kept eating were twice as likely to be on solid food at three to...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Sybil (MIT/MGH lung cancer risk from CT)emerging: Predicts a person's six-year lung cancer risk from one low-dose CT, even when no nodule is visible.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Synthetic lethality approachesapproved: Finding a second gene that a cancer needs only because its first gene is broken, then hitting the second one.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Systematic drug repurposingphase-3: Testing cheap old drugs, aspirin, metformin, statins, beta-blockers, as cancer treatments, because they are safe, available and sometimes work.Open in Atlas onco.cc

T

T-cell engagers (bispecific)approved: An off-the-shelf drug that physically links a killer T cell to a cancer cell, forcing the attack.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Tai chi and qigongestablished: Slow, low-impact movement practices from Chinese tradition improve fatigue, sleep and balance in people with cancer. Randomised trials are moderately sized and positive, and the 2024 fatigue guideline recommends them during treatment.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Tandem autologous transplantstandard-of-care: Tandem transplant gives two back-to-back rounds of marrow-destroying chemotherapy, each rescued with the child's own stored stem cells, for high-risk neuroblastoma in North America. It kept more children relapse-free than one transplant in a randomised tria...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Targeted alpha therapyphase-3: Like radioligand therapy but with alpha particles: far more destructive over a much shorter range, so single cells can be killed with less collateral damage.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Targeting the tumour's own microbespreclinical: Some tumours contain bacteria and fungi that shelter cancer cells and break down chemotherapy. Killing them may make treatment work.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Targeting tumour mechanics and pressurepreclinical: Stiff, high-pressure tumours squeeze their own blood vessels shut, keeping drugs out. Softening them is a way in.Open in Atlas onco.cc
TCR-T cell therapyapproved: T cells engineered with a receptor that sees fragments of proteins inside the cancer cell, reaching targets CAR-T cannot.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Teeth, jaws and facial growth after treatment in childhoodestablished: Treatment given while the teeth are forming can stop them forming. In the largest survey, survivors were three times more likely than siblings to report small teeth, three times more likely to report abnormal roots and nearly ten times more likely to report...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Telehealth and hospital-at-home in oncologyestablished: Video visits, remote monitoring and home delivery of some cancer treatments expanded massively during COVID-19 and have stayed; they reduce travel burden, especially for rural patients, without evidence of worse outcomes.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Telemedicine, teleoncology, and telepathologyestablished: Video visits, remote second opinions, and slides reviewed from afar, which let rural and low-resource patients reach specialists.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Telomere length after treatmentemerging: Telomeres are the caps on chromosomes that shorten each time a cell divides. They are the oldest and best known measure of cellular ageing, and the one with the least to show for itself in cancer survivors so far: the measurements exist, the associations ar...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Tempus multimodal modelsemerging: Models trained on Tempus's paired genomic, pathology, imaging and outcome data to predict response and prognosis.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Testosterone after cancer treatment in menestablished: Low testosterone is common after cancer treatment and is rarely looked for: it was present in 38.5 per cent of 491 men treated for testicular cancer, in about half of a separate cohort whether or not they had chemotherapy, and in a third of adults given cra...Open in Atlas onco.cc
The ADC supply chain (antibody, payload-linker, conjugation, fill)established: An antibody-drug conjugate needs three separate factories: one growing the antibody, one making the poison and its linker in sealed rooms, and one joining them. Then a fourth fills the vials. Any of the four can hold up the drug.Open in Atlas onco.cc
The biological age test you can buy, and whether to buy oneemerging: You can send saliva or blood to a company and be told your biological age. The underlying science is real and is described in the records on biological ageing after treatment; the test you can buy is not that science. Repeat measurements of the same sample...Open in Atlas onco.cc
The carer's own recovery: what is known about the person who is not the patientestablished: In studies that measured both halves of a couple, anxiety was reported by 40.1 per cent of spouses against 28.0 per cent of the people they cared for, and the review of fear of recurrence found carers reported more fear than patients. Across 29 randomised t...Open in Atlas onco.cc
The Children's Oncology Group Long-Term Follow-Up Guidelinesstandard-of-care: The most widely used rulebook in childhood cancer survivorship, and the one that made follow-up exposure-based rather than diagnosis-based: what you were given decides what you are screened for. It comes with Health Links, plain-language sheets written for...Open in Atlas onco.cc
The cumulative dose that decides whether it comes backestablished: For several treatments there is a published number above which lasting damage becomes much likelier: the total anthracycline dose and heart failure, the total cisplatin dose and hearing, the radiation dose to the parotid gland and dry mouth. Twenty-three th...Open in Atlas onco.cc
The devices that do the restoring, and who pays for themstandard-of-care: A breast prosthesis, a limb prosthesis, a compression garment, a voice valve, a dental implant and a hearing aid are each the difference between a function working and not working, and each is funded differently. In the United States a federal law requires...Open in Atlas onco.cc
The exercise prescription after cancer: the dose the guidelines stateestablished: Exercise is the best-evidenced thing a person can do for their own recovery, and the guidelines put a number on it: moderate aerobic exercise at least three times a week for at least thirty minutes, for eight to twelve weeks, plus resistance training twice...Open in Atlas onco.cc
The four Rs and accelerated repopulationestablished: Radiotherapy works through repair, redistribution, reoxygenation and repopulation between fractions; the discovery that tumours speed up their regrowth during a course explained why gaps in treatment cost cures and led to accelerated schedules.Open in Atlas onco.cc
The gap between the rehabilitation people need and the rehabilitation they are offeredestablished: This is the measured part. Among 163 women with advanced breast cancer, 92 per cent had at least one physical impairment and 530 impairments were found; 30 per cent of those needing rehabilitation got it. In an Irish cancer centre in 2025, 71 per cent of 66...Open in Atlas onco.cc
The handover from children's to adult services, where follow-up falls awayemerging: This is where survivorship care is lost. Of 8,522 adult survivors asked, 88.8 per cent had seen a doctor in the previous two years but only 17.8 per cent had received care that addressed their cancer history with risk advice or screening. Among those who sh...Open in Atlas onco.cc
The heart after anthracyclines and chest radiotherapy in childhoodstandard-of-care: Heart damage from childhood treatment appears quietly and decades later. When 1,853 adult survivors were examined rather than asked, 7.4 per cent had cardiomyopathy and 28 per cent had valve disease, and most of it was new at that visit: nearly all of them...Open in Atlas onco.cc
The linear-quadratic model and fractionationestablished: The equation radiotherapy uses to compare schedules: cell kill has a part proportional to dose and a part proportional to dose squared, and the ratio between them (alpha over beta) tells you how much a tissue cares about the size of each fraction.Open in Atlas onco.cc
The lungs after transplant: bronchiolitis obliterans syndromeestablished: The smallest airways in the lung can scar shut after a donor transplant. It is the form of chronic GvHD that changes the outlook most, and it is usually silent until a lot of lung function has gone. It is found by breathing tests on a schedule rather than b...Open in Atlas onco.cc
The pituitary, puberty and the hypothalamic axis after cranial radiotherapy in childhoodstandard-of-care: Radiotherapy near the base of the brain damages the gland that runs growth, puberty, the thyroid and the stress response, in that order of sensitivity. In 748 survivors treated with cranial radiotherapy, 46.5 per cent had growth hormone deficiency, 10.8 per...Open in Atlas onco.cc
The questionnaires that were never returned, and the people never askedestablished: In a trial measuring how people feel, the forms go missing exactly when people are most unwell. That makes the remaining scores look better than the truth. The same thing happens on a larger scale when whole groups are not asked at all.Open in Atlas onco.cc
The word survivor, and why the vocabulary is not a detailestablished: In the one in-depth British study to ask, most of 40 people interviewed at least five years after a diagnosis of breast, bowel or prostate cancer rejected the word survivor, and the authors recommended descriptive terms instead. A wider review of eight canc...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Therapeutic isotope supply chain (Mo-99, Lu-177, Ac-225)established: Where the radioactive atoms for imaging and therapy actually come from: ageing reactors, new accelerators, and a scramble for actinium.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Thermal ablation (RFA, microwave, cryo)standard-of-care: Thermal ablation kills a tumour with heat or cold delivered through a needle, with no incision required.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Thermal ablation and cryotherapy for cervical precancerstandard-of-care: Destroying precancerous cervical cells with a heated or frozen probe in under a minute, the tool that makes screen-and-treat possible where there are no surgeons.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Thinking and memory after cancer treatment: what is measurable, and what helpsestablished: Trouble with memory, concentration and word-finding after chemotherapy is real and measurable, and what a person reports and what a test shows often do not match. Cognitive rehabilitation is the approach with the best trial evidence, exercise helps on some...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Thyroglobulin, calcitonin and CEA in thyroid cancer follow-upstandard-of-care: After the thyroid is removed for cancer, a blood protein it alone makes, thyroglobulin, should fall to nothing, so any measurable level in follow-up means cancer is still there; in medullary thyroid cancer the same job is done by calcitonin and CEA, whose d...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Thyroid nodule FNA, Bethesda cytology & molecular classifiersstandard-of-care: Thyroid fine-needle aspiration takes a needle sample from a thyroid lump and grades it on a six-level scale; when the result is uncertain, a gene test on the same sample can often rule cancer out and avoid surgery.Open in Atlas onco.cc
TIGIT blockadephase-3: Antibodies against TIGIT, a brake on T cells and natural killer cells, tested alongside PD-L1 drugs; the biggest lung cancer trials so far have failed.Open in Atlas onco.cc
TIL therapyapproved: Immune cells that have already found their way into the tumour are harvested, grown to billions, and returned.Open in Atlas onco.cc
TIM-3 blockadephase-2: Antibodies against TIM-3, a checkpoint on exhausted T cells and myeloid cells, tested mostly with PD-1 drugs and in blood cancers.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Time-restricted eating in cancer prevention and survivorshipphase-2: Time-restricted eating means eating within a window of 8-12 hours a day and fasting overnight. It improves blood sugar and weight a little; whether it changes cancer risk or recurrence is unknown.Open in Atlas onco.cc
TITAN (whole-slide multimodal model)emerging: TITAN is a model that summarises a whole slide, not just tiles, and can write a draft pathology report.Open in Atlas onco.cc
TomoTherapy and Radixact (helical radiotherapy)established: Radiotherapy delivered the way a CT scan is taken: a small accelerator circles the patient while the couch slides through, painting the dose slice by slice with a fast shutter-like collimator. It handles very long or oddly shaped targets and images the pati...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Topoisomerase-I inhibitors (and ADC payloads)standard-of-care: Topoisomerase-I inhibitors jam the enzyme that untangles DNA during copying, causing double-strand breaks. As free drugs (irinotecan, topotecan) they are modest, but their analogues SN-38 and deruxtecan are the dominant antibody-drug conjugate payload class...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Total body and total marrow irradiationestablished: Irradiating the whole body, or just the bones and marrow, to wipe out the patient's blood system and immune cells before a stem cell transplant.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Total skin electron beam therapyestablished: A low-energy electron beam treats the entire skin surface, for lymphomas that live in the skin, without penetrating to the organs beneath.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Total-body PET for screening and ultra-low-dose imagingconcept: Scanners sensitive enough to image the whole body in seconds at a fraction of the radiation dose, which raises the question of whether healthy people should be scanned at all.Open in Atlas onco.cc
TPMT and NUDT15 genotyping before thiopurinesstandard-of-care: Before children and adults with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia start two years of daily mercaptopurine, two genes are checked; carriers of low-activity variants need a fraction of the standard dose or their bone marrow shuts down within weeks.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Traditional Chinese herbal medicine alongside treatmentphase-2: Traditional Chinese herbal medicine prescribes individualised multi-herb decoctions, taken by most cancer patients in China to reduce chemotherapy side effects. Cochrane reviews found the hundreds of trials small, unblinded and poorly reported, so whether t...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Trained innate immunityphase-2: Giving the innate immune system a memory, so monocytes and NK cells respond harder the next time they meet a tumour.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Transarterial chemoembolisation (TACE)standard-of-care: A catheter threaded into the artery feeding a liver tumour delivers chemotherapy and then blocks the vessel, starving the tumour from inside.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Transcranial focused ultrasound systems (Exablate Neuro, SonoCloud)phase-2: A helmet of a thousand ultrasound emitters, or a small implant under the skull, that sends sound through the bone into the brain. Approved for tremor, it is being tested in brain tumours to open the brain's protective barrier for a few hours so that drugs c...Open in Atlas onco.cc
TranscriptFormer and rBio (CZI virtual cell models)emerging: CZI's open cross-species cell models and a reasoning model trained on them.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Transfusion support and anaemia managementstandard-of-care: Red cell and platelet transfusions, iron and erythropoiesis-stimulating agents keep patients safe through chemotherapy and marrow failure; restrictive thresholds and ESA caution reflect trials showing more is not better.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Transoral robotic surgery (TORS)established: Transoral robotic surgery removes early (T1 to T2) throat tumours through the mouth with a robot and 3D endoscope, avoiding splitting the jaw or a tracheostomy. In HPV-positive oropharyngeal cancer the pathology then guides how much radiation to add, but ra...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Treating fear of recurrence: the randomised trials, their effect sizes, and where the treatment is availableemerging: Treatment aimed specifically at fear of recurrence works, and the effect is small: across 23 controlled trials the pooled difference was 0.33 of a standard deviation afterwards and 0.28 at follow-up. The two largest randomised trials, ConquerFear with 222 p...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Trispecific antibodiesphase-1: Antibodies engineered to bind three things at once, for example a tumour antigen, a T-cell activator and a co-stimulatory signal, to make a stronger or more selective immune attack.Open in Atlas onco.cc
TROP2 PETphase-1: An experimental PET scan that shows whether a tumour carries the TROP2 protein, so doctors could pick the right ADC before giving it.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Troponin and natriuretic peptide monitoring during cancer treatmentestablished: Two routine blood tests, troponin for heart muscle injury and natriuretic peptides for heart strain, taken before and during heart-toxic cancer drugs so that damage is caught weeks or months before the heart's pumping falls on a scan.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Tumour clonal evolution trackingemerging: Sequencing several parts of a tumour, or blood over time, to draw its family tree of mutations and see which branches drive relapse and resistance.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Tumour control and normal tissue complication probability (TCP and NTCP)established: Curves that turn a radiation dose into a probability: how likely the tumour is to be eradicated and how likely a nearby organ is to be damaged. They underlie dose constraints, dose escalation trials and comparisons between treatment plans.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Tumour hypoxia: imaging and modificationemerging: Cells short of oxygen are up to three times harder to kill with radiation. Finding hypoxic tumours and fixing the shortage, with drugs, breathing gases or dose escalation, is one of radiobiology's oldest ideas and still unfinished business.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Tumour mutational burden testingestablished: Counting how many mutations a tumour carries per stretch of DNA; heavily mutated tumours are more likely to respond to immunotherapy.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Tumour treating fields (TTFields)approved: Wearable electrodes that deliver alternating electric fields disrupting cancer cell division.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Tumour volume doubling timeestablished: How long a tumour takes to double in volume, measured from two scans; it separates cancers from benign nodules in lung screening, sorts aggressive from indolent disease and estimates how long a tumour has been present.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Tumour-immune dynamics modelsemerging: Predator-prey style equations describe how immune cells hunt tumour cells, and they reproduce dormancy, escape and the delayed, sometimes explosive, responses seen with immunotherapy; they now help design combination and scheduling trials.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Tumour-on-a-chipemerging: Small microfluidic devices that grow tumour cells with blood-vessel-like channels and immune cells, letting researchers watch drugs act in a more life-like setting than a dish.Open in Atlas onco.cc

U

UGT1A1 genotyping before irinotecanestablished: A gene test that finds people who clear irinotecan's active form slowly because of a common variant in the UGT1A1 enzyme, the same variant behind harmless Gilbert syndrome; they run a higher risk of severe diarrhoea and low white cells at full dose.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Ultra-processed food and sugar-sweetened drinksemerging: Diets high in industrially processed foods and sugary drinks are linked with more cancer, mainly through obesity but perhaps also through additives and packaging chemicals. Sugar itself does not 'feed' a tumour in the way social media claims.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Ultrasoundstandard-of-care: Ultrasound uses sound waves to make live pictures; it is cheap, safe, and used to guide needles into lumps.Open in Atlas onco.cc
UNI and CONCH (Harvard, Mahmood Lab)emerging: Two open academic pathology models: UNI reads tissue images, CONCH links images with pathology text.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Universal Cell Embedding (UCE)emerging: Universal Cell Embedding maps any cell from any species into one shared space without retraining.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Unlicensed peptides sold for recoverypreclinical: BPC-157, ipamorelin, thymosin, CJC-1295 and the rest are sold online and by clinics for healing, energy and recovery after treatment. The FDA has placed several of them on the list of substances that may present significant safety risks in compounding, and...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Urine tests for bladder cancer (cytology, FISH, RNA and methylation)established: A family of tests on a urine sample that look for cancer cells or their DNA and RNA; none can yet replace a camera examination of the bladder, but the newer ones are good enough to let low-risk patients safely skip some of them.Open in Atlas onco.cc

V

Vaginal oestrogen after breast cancer: what the evidence says, and where it disagreesestablished: Vaginal dryness and painful sex after cancer treatment are common, lasting and under-treated. Low-dose vaginal oestrogen is the usual answer outside cancer, and for women on an aromatase inhibitor the guidance disagrees: American and British bodies read the...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Very-high-energy electron therapypreclinical: VHEE radiotherapy fires electrons at 100 to 250 MeV, energies that reach deep tumours and can be steered by magnets, aiming to deliver FLASH-speed radiation from a machine smaller and cheaper than a proton facility. It is still at the accelerator-developmen...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Viral vector manufacturing (lentiviral, retroviral, AAV)established: Producing the engineered viruses that carry a CAR gene into T cells. Viral vector manufacturing is a long-standing bottleneck for cell and gene therapy.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Virchow / Virchow2 (Paige, MSK)emerging: A pathology foundation model trained on millions of slides that can detect cancer and predict biomarkers from an ordinary H&E slide.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Virus-specific T cellsapproved: Off-the-shelf T cells from healthy donors that recognise Epstein-Barr virus, used to treat virus-driven lymphomas after transplant; tabelecleucel was approved in Europe in 2022.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Visual inspection with acetic acid (VIA) for cervical screeningestablished: A nurse paints the cervix with household-strength vinegar and looks with a torch: precancer turns white within a minute and can be frozen or heat-treated at the same visit, which is how cervical cancer deaths were cut by a third in Indian villages without a...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Vitamin D and omega-3 supplementationphase-3: The largest trial of vitamin D and fish-oil pills found they did not prevent cancer. A possible reduction in cancer deaths, and hints of benefit after a digestive cancer diagnosis, keep the question alive.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Voice after the larynx is removedstandard-of-care: Removing the larynx removes the voice and separates the airway from the mouth permanently. Speech is restored in most people by a one-way valve set in a small hole between the windpipe and the gullet, which lets breath out through the throat so the throat c...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Volumetric modulated arc therapy (VMAT)established: The linac sweeps around the patient in one or two arcs while the beam shape, dose rate and speed all change, delivering an IMRT-quality plan in a couple of minutes.Open in Atlas onco.cc

W

Walking, gripping and standing up: the tests that take five minutesstandard-of-care: How far somebody walks in six minutes, how hard they can squeeze a handle, and how fast they can stand up from a chair five times. These need almost no equipment, they predict what happens to people, and they measure something a questionnaire cannot.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Wearables and step counts: measuring what someone actually doesemerging: A wrist or hip device records steps, activity and sleep continuously, at home, without anyone being asked a question. It measures behaviour rather than capacity, which is the gap a corridor test leaves, and it is the one measurement of recovery that does no...Open in Atlas onco.cc
What a difference has to be before a person would notice itestablished: A trial can report a statistically significant change in a quality of life score that no person would notice. The minimally important difference is the attempt to say how much a score has to move to correspond to something a patient would call a change, and...Open in Atlas onco.cc
What a prehabilitation programme actually contains, and how long it needsestablished: The programme behind the best colorectal result was four weeks long, supervised in hospital, and had four parts: high-intensity exercise three times a week, a nutritional intervention, psychological support, and smoking cessation where it applied. Supervisi...Open in Atlas onco.cc
What actually works after treatmentestablished: Exercise, sleep, not smoking, treating what is treatable and keeping up surveillance outperform everything currently sold as rejuvenation, by a wide margin and with randomised trials behind them. The measurable ageing that treatment causes is real and is a...Open in Atlas onco.cc
What comes back after treatment, treatment by treatmentestablished: For each treatment and each lasting effect, whether recovery is usual, partial or unlikely, how long it takes and in what proportion of people, with the source for every answer. The grid is mostly empty, because for most pairs nobody has published a recover...Open in Atlas onco.cc
What has actually been implemented since those trials, and what has notemerging: The trials finished years ago and most people being treated for cancer are still not asked their symptoms between appointments. The clearest thing that changed is a United States payment model that now requires practices to collect them.Open in Atlas onco.cc
What recovery costs in the rest of the worldemerging: In Germany rehabilitation is an entitlement with the outpatient version free to the patient. In most of the world there is no survivorship service to be charged for, and the household pays for whatever follow-up happens. Reliable comparative figures do not...Open in Atlas onco.cc
What recovery costs in the UK, and what it does notestablished: Cancer treatment makes prescriptions free in England for five years, but a wig is not a prescription and is charged for unless you qualify for help. A third of UK survivors in one survey still reported financial difficulty, which is lower than the United St...Open in Atlas onco.cc
What recovery costs in the United Statesestablished: More than half of United States survivors in a comparative survey reported financial difficulty, against a third in the UK. What a person pays for rehabilitation, psychological care, fertility preservation and a wig depends on their insurance, their state a...Open in Atlas onco.cc
What the randomised trials of prehabilitation found, operation by operationestablished: Training before an operation reliably makes people fitter for it. Whether it cuts complications depends on the operation and on who was recruited: a trial in high-risk abdominal surgery halved the proportion with complications, the largest colorectal trial...Open in Atlas onco.cc
When steroids fail: ruxolitinib for steroid-refractory GvHDapproved: First treatment for graft-versus-host disease is steroids, and in about half of people with chronic disease they do not work or cannot be reduced. Ruxolitinib is the only drug that has beaten the alternatives in a randomised trial here, and it has done so t...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Where rehabilitation is commissioned, and who misses outestablished: Whether a person gets rehabilitation after cancer depends on where the problem was noticed, how far they live from the service, how much money they have and what they were treated for. In the benchmark study a problem found in hospital was 88 times more lik...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Who gets told about fertility before treatment, and who does notestablished: Fertility preservation has to happen before treatment starts, which makes it the most time-critical part of recovery care and the easiest to miss. Published United States rates of even having the conversation range from 9 per cent to 75 per cent depending o...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Who is supposed to be watching: EBMT, CIBMTR, FACT-JACIE, and what a survivor is actually offeredstandard-of-care: There is an agreed international list of what should be checked in someone who has had a transplant, and how often, and an accreditation system that centres are inspected against. What there is much less of is a guarantee that any individual survivor is rec...Open in Atlas onco.cc
Who misses out on recovery care, measuredestablished: Every part of recovery care is unevenly distributed, and the pattern repeats: people with less money, less education, more disability, who live further away or whose cancer is less common get less of it. These are measured gaps with sources, not an impression.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Whole-body MRIestablished: Whole-body MRI is an MRI of the entire body without radiation, used to find spread in myeloma and to screen people with high inherited cancer risk.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Whole-exome & whole-genome sequencingestablished: Reading all the genes (exome) or the entire DNA (genome) of a tumour, rather than a chosen panel.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Whole-slide scanners and image managementestablished: The scanners that turn glass slides into gigapixel images, and the software that stores and serves them, without which pathology AI cannot run.Open in Atlas onco.cc
Wigs, cranial prostheses and head coveringsestablished: A wig, scarf or cap restores privacy and confidence during hair loss. In the UK wigs come on NHS prescription, free in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and in England for children, students under 19 and people on qualifying benefits; in the US a prescri...Open in Atlas onco.cc

X

X-ray radiography and fluoroscopystandard-of-care: The plain X-ray is the oldest and cheapest medical image: a single shadow picture of bone and lung. Fluoroscopy is the live-video version, used to steer needles, catheters and stents during cancer procedures.Open in Atlas onco.cc

Y

Yoga during and after cancer treatmentestablished: Yoga combining postures, breathing and relaxation reduces fatigue, anxiety and low mood and improves sleep and quality of life, on the evidence of a Cochrane review of 24 randomised trials in women with breast cancer. SIO-ASCO guidelines recommend it for fa...Open in Atlas onco.cc

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ZAP-X gyroscopic radiosurgeryemerging: A self-shielded brain radiosurgery machine: a compact accelerator swings around the head on two nested gantries inside its own steel shell, so it needs no concrete bunker and no radioactive cobalt, and can be installed in an ordinary outpatient building.Open in Atlas onco.cc