News & Comment

Three years after the pandemic began, COVID-19 is here to stay. Yet the effects of COVID-19 on cancer research are still unravelling.

Our ‘2022 in Review’ Focus highlights the year’s key developments in the cancer field in news articles, specially commissioned comment and opinion pieces, and an overview of the year’s most striking cancer research curated by the Nature Cancer editorial team.

Antibody–drug conjugates (ADCs) were first developed in the 1980s, and since then, technical advances have allowed their approval by the US Food and Drug Administration and their use in the treatment of various cancers. In 2022, several new ADCs were developed and tested in clinical trials, with promising results.

Liquid biopsies of circulating tumor DNA offer a non-invasive tool with many potential applications in oncology, including early cancer detection, profiling, disease prognosis, prediction of therapy response and monitoring disease status. A growing body of literature and clinical trials support an increasingly valuable role for liquid biopsies in the care of patients with solid malignancies.

Recent progress indicates a considerably improved mechanistic understanding of CAR T cell biology and delivers important insights into why some patients achieve durable remissions and others do not. In addition, although most success has been achieved in the context of CAR T cells targeted to B cell tumor antigens, namely CD19 and BCMA, we are seeing promising clinical trial outcomes for solid tumor malignancies.

From the first engineered T cell receptor medicine to regulatory snubs over China-only data, 2022 was another action-packed year for the oncology drug development community.

Tumors with DNA mismatch repair or proofreading deficiencies, either at the germinal or somatic level, usually present with high tumor mutational burden and often show striking responses to checkpoint blockade immunotherapy. Ongoing translational and clinical investigations of those tumor subsets provide avenues for further improvement in patient outcomes.

Lisa M. Coussens is Professor and Chair of the Cell, Developmental and Cancer Biology department, and Deputy Director of Basic and Translational Research in the Knight Cancer Institute, at Oregon Health and Science University in Portland Oregon, USA. She is also President of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) for 2022–2023. Nature Cancer caught up with her to hear her thoughts on the past year and what’s in store for 2023.