From non-surgical treatments to AI: Advances in war on cancer

From combining treatments in unprecedented ways to deploying artificial intelligence for personalised medicine, a raft of new advances in the fight against cancer have been presented at the European Society for Medical Oncology (Esmo), which ends on Tuesday.

Here are some of the big announcements made at the five-day conference held in the Spanish city of Barcelona, which brought together 30,000 specialist doctors and researchers from around the world.

Women who breastfeed after receiving treatment for breast cancer do not have a higher risk of their cancer returning or of getting new tumours, according to two international studies presented at the conference.

This was also true for women carrying a genetic mutation called BRCA, which significantly increases the chance of developing breast cancer, the research found.

There had previously been concerns about pregnancy and breastfeeding after women had been diagnosed with breast cancer, because both can affect hormone levels.

"These results are key for women who wish to become pregnant and breastfeed their baby after breast cancer," said Fedro Alessandro Peccatori, a researcher and doctor at the European Institute of Oncology in Milan.

Immunotherapy, which stimulates the body's immune system to fight tumours, has already been shown to be an effective weapon against lung cancer.

On Saturday, the results of a phase two trial revealed promising signs against metastatic non-small cell lung cancer, which is when the most common form of lung cancer spreads to other parts of the body.

The trial tested a new combination of two different immunotherapies along with chemotherapy.

"By aiming at a second target of the immune system and combining these treatments, it seems that we are improving response rates — that is, the number of patients who have their tumours shrink," said Nicolas Girard, an oncologist at France's Curie Institute.

Another combination of immunotherapy and chemotherapy produced excellent results against a very rare form of pregnancy-related cancer which develops in the placenta. The cancer only occurs in around one out of every 10,000 pregnancies.

The combination of treatments led to 96 per cent of the cancer in patients being eradicated.

"This is an exceptional result," said Benoit You, a France-based oncologist who presented the research.

A huge artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm trained on a database of more than a billion images of tumours from around 30,000 patients in the United States also showed promise for future cancer treatment, researchers said on Monday.