Innovation in Oncology: a Promising Future for Patients – Position Paper Alcimed

Cancer will soon be death cause number 1 on a global level representing strong unmet medical needs and enormous costs for healthcare systems. New, innovative treatments and technologies as well as personalization of treatments are required in order to drastically improve the patients’ situation and cure cancer one day.

Those needs as well as other factors such as social responsibility of involved players foster a solid funding situation and research in the field that leads to innovation. Recent breakthroughs such as checkpoint-inhibitors or Car T-cell therapies are now used to treat many patients. Personalization of treatments is ongoing, prominent examples are tumour agnostic treatment options for around 1% of all cancer patients. Innovation in the future will strongly impact early detection of cancer and allow for much clearer diagnoses, or treatment decisions; thanks to high quality of real-world data and artificial intelligence.

In this position paper, we describe not only the path to current innovation and very recent developments as the ones mentioned above but we also investigate which innovation we can expect to happen in cancer care or treatment in the future as well as discuss challenges linked to these.