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Twenty-Five Years of Progress in Cancer

As we close out the first quarter of the twenty-first century, it isn’t hard to notice how much the world has changed since the year 2000. Smartphones. Social media. Artificial intelligence.  

But how much has cancer care changed? A lot. Possibly more than you think. Treatment for many cancers now include many options beyond chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery.  

And advances are accelerating, thanks to the efforts of scientific investigators and clinical researchers at Dana-Farber and elsewhere. These advancements are reaching patients with cancer — millions of patients in the U.S. alone — and extending and improving the quality of their lives. 

What drugs are used to treat cancer now that were not available in 2000? 

There are eleven new types of cancer therapies in use and approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) since 2000. Each therapy type — such as CAR T-cell therapy and radioligand therapy — may have many distinct approved medicines in the category. 

Are these therapies still being studied and improved? 

Scientists are working hard to figure out how to cure more patients and improve quality of life. To do this they are building on these existing modes of therapy in multiple ways:  

  • Making new versions of existing therapies that work on different forms of cancer, such as the development of CAR T-cell therapies for childhood brain cancer and adult solid tumors. 
  • Making new and next-generation versions of targeted therapies, such as novel RAS inhibitors. For example, Dana-Farber has created the Center for RAS Therapeutics to discover new RAS-targeted therapies and to provide patients with the most promising treatment options.
  • Testing existing and new medicines in combinations that researchers think — based on evidence from clinical trials — will improve the benefits for patients. Dana-Farber research led to the creation of CDK4/6 inhibitors, for example, and continues to shape their use in the treatment of breast cancer.
  • Creating entirely new forms of therapeutics, such as NK cell therapies, which are made of white blood cells that have specialized roles as part of the body’s immune response and can kill tumor and infected cells. 

This research is advancing rapidly. Because of these advances since 2000, there are more than 100 distinct new medicines approved for cancer today. In addition, there are many more instances of the above types of therapies being tested in clinical trials. Note that a drug in a clinical trial is under investigation and might not result in an approval for broad use in patients. 

How has approved cancer therapy advanced in 2025? 

In 2025, the FDA approved more than a dozen new drugs for cancer and expanded the use of several already approved cancer drugs so that more patients can benefit from them.  

Dana-Farber science has played a substantive role in the discovery and clinical testing of several approved drugs approved in 2025, including: 

  • Belzutifan, approved for kidney cancer, is a small molecule that inhibits HIF-2alpha, which is overactive in some cancers. 
  • Cabozantinib, approved for neuroendocrine tumors of the pancreas or elsewhere, is an anti-angiogenic drug that blocks blood vessel formation in tumors. 
  • Dordaviprone, approved for diffuse midline glioma, is an epigenetic medicine that reprograms cancer cells without changing the DNA. 
  • Pembrolizumab, approved as up-front treatment for head and neck cancer, is an immune checkpoint inhibitor that unmasks cancer so the immune system can fight it. 
  • Revumenib, approved for acute leukemia, is an epigenetic medicine. 
  • Sunvozertinib, approved for EGFR-mutated non-small cell lung cancer, is a small molecule inhibitor that blocks the activity of genes that drive cancer. 

What other exciting Dana-Farber science advanced in 2025? 

Dana-Farber scientists are constantly working to improve cancer care. Their research includes the discovery and development of new classes of medicine, clinical trials of novel medicines, and investigations that aim to benefit patients after treatment. 

Novel classes of medicines have entered clinical trials and will undergo more research in the coming years: 

  • Natural killer (NK) cell therapies are a novel type of medicine that engineer natural killer cells in the immune system to attack cancer. NK cell therapies are in clinical trials, including a new trial testing the approach in ovarian cancer. 
  • Personalized cancer vaccines train the immune system to watch out for and kill a patient’s specific form of cancer. Cancer vaccines are continually being improved and tested in clinical trials, including recent early phase trials in kidney cancer and melanoma. 
  • Direct cyclin inhibitors are a new class of drug that disables a quality control checkpoint in the cell cycle. Evidence gathered by Dana-Farber investigators supports testing of the strategy in a phase 1 clinical trial that is now open nationwide for patients with small cell lung cancer, triple negative breast cancer, and other cancers. 

Late-stage clinical trials of novel medicines: 

  • Pancreatic cancer: Approximately 95% of all pancreatic cancers harbor RAS mutations. No RAS-targeted therapies are approved for the treatment of pancreatic cancer yet, but clinical studies are underway. Based on encouraging results from a phase 1 clinical trial, Brian Wolpin, MD, MPH, director of the Hale Family Center for Pancreatic Cancer Research at Dana-Farber, and other investigators are leading a phase 3 study of a small molecule RAS inhibitor called daraxonrasib in patients with metastatic pancreatic cancer who have progressed after receiving first line chemotherapy.  
  • Triple-negative breast cancer: An antibody-drug conjugate, a form of targeted chemotherapy, called sacituzumab govitecan could be a potential new standard of care for patients with previously untreated advanced triple-negative breast cancer, according to findings from the ASCENT-03 trial presented by Sara Tolaney, MD, MPH, chief of the Breast Oncology Center. Dana-Farber investigators were involved in the first studies of sacituzumab govitecan in humans and participated in the pivotal clinical trials that led to its initial approval for patients with pre-treated triple-negative breast cancer.  
  • Metastatic breast cancer: Tolaney also presented findings this year from the DESTINY-Breast09 study showing that the combination of the ADC trastuzumab deruxtecan (T-DXd) plus pertuzumab nearly doubled progression-free survival compared to the currently accepted standard treatment for first-line therapy of metastatic human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2)-positive breast cancer. The findings could result in a change in practice. 
  • Lung cancer: Combination therapy could also improve outcomes and survival for patients with newly diagnosed EGFR-mutated advanced non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) based on findings from the FLAURA2 trial presented by Pasi A. Jänne, MD, PhD, director of the Lowe Center for Thoracic Oncology. The findings could result in a change of practice. 

Dana-Farber research also helps improve cancer diagnostics and post-treatment disease management: 

“Without question, the pace of science is accelerating, and we’re seeing incredible advances in the treatment of cancer,” says Benjamin L. Ebert, MD, PhD, president and CEO of Dana-Farber. “One reason that our Dana-Farber ecosystem is so powerful is because we have clinicians and scientists who are leaders in each of these new technologies, and they are eager to collaborate on the bench-to-bedside-and-back research that would be impossible to do in isolation.”