The United States has achieved a remarkable milestone in the fight against cancer: a 35% decline in cancer death rates between 1991 and 2024, translating to 4.8 million fewer cancer deaths. This progress reflects decades of coordinated research efforts, federal investment, and emerging technologies that are fundamentally changing how doctors detect, treat, and prevent the disease.

What's Driving This Historic Decline in Cancer Deaths?

The drop in cancer mortality stems from multiple converging factors working together. Reduced smoking rates have played a significant role, but advances in prevention, early detection, and treatment have equally contributed to saving lives. The five-year survival rate for advanced cancers has more than doubled over the past three decades, rising from 17% in the mid-1990s to 36% during 2016-2022, according to the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Cancer Progress Report 2026.

Federal investments in cancer research through the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Cancer Institute (NCI), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have been essential to this progress. These agencies have supported basic, translational, and clinical cancer research that has directly improved patient outcomes.

How Are AI and New Technologies Reshaping Cancer Care?

Artificial intelligence is emerging as one of the most transformative tools in modern oncology. The AACR report highlights several ways AI is accelerating progress across the cancer research and treatment pipeline:

• Accelerating Basic Research: Researchers have combined AI with advanced spatial imaging technologies to generate high-resolution maps of tumors, revealing how cancer cells and immune cells interact within the tumor microenvironment.
• Speeding Drug Development: Using one recently developed AI model, researchers screened approximately 10,000 human proteins against more than 500 million compounds, identifying more than 2 million candidate molecules for further study.
• Improving Cancer Screening: AI demonstrates clear benefits in cancer screening and early detection by improving the interpretation of routine medical images and allowing for more accurate analysis of complex tissue samples, as reflected by recent FDA approvals of several AI-assisted devices and software tools.
• Personalizing Treatment: AI-driven technologies are improving clinicians' ability to predict patient outcomes, personalize treatment plans, and enhance clinical trial design, while potentially helping prevent burnout among healthcare providers.

The FDA approved several AI-based tools to improve early detection and diagnosis of cancers during the 12-month period covered by the report, signaling regulatory confidence in these emerging technologies.

What New Cancer Drugs and Therapies Were Approved Recently?

Between July 1, 2025, and June 30, 2026, the FDA approved 11 new anticancer therapeutics, marking continued momentum in drug development. These approvals represent diverse approaches to fighting cancer and address previously underserved patient populations.

Notable approvals include the first molecularly targeted therapy for a rare, aggressive brain tumor with a specific genetic alteration, and the first approval of a proteolysis-targeting chimera, a molecularly targeted therapeutic that harnesses the cell's protein degradation machinery to kill cancer cells, for patients with breast cancer. The FDA also approved the first immune checkpoint inhibitor for ovarian cancer and the first chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy for patients with marginal zone lymphoma.

Beyond new drugs, the FDA approved new uses for five previously approved anticancer therapeutics, a wearable, noninvasive device for treating pancreatic cancer, and an at-home human papillomavirus (HPV) self-collection kit, expanding access to prevention and early detection tools.

"Over the course of my 25-year career as a physician-scientist, I have witnessed a remarkable transformation in our understanding of cancer and how we diagnose and treat patients. Advances in genomics, immunology, and artificial intelligence have given us more insight than ever before into the complexities of cancer," said Keith Flaherty, MD, FAACR, chair of the AACR Cancer Progress Report 2026 Steering Committee.

Keith Flaherty, MD, FAACR, Chair of the AACR Cancer Progress Report 2026 Steering Committee

Are Weight Loss Drugs Helping Prevent Cancer?

An emerging area of cancer prevention research involves glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) receptor agonists, a class of weight loss medications. Early studies suggest these drugs may reduce the risk of developing obesity-related cancers, though the evidence remains mixed.

A recent study found that semaglutide use was associated with a 12% reduction in obesity-related cancer risk. In a separate study, GLP-1 use among individuals with type 2 diabetes was associated with a 40% lower risk of esophageal cancer and a 46% lower risk of colorectal cancer compared with insulin therapy. GLP-1 use may also be associated with reductions in the risk of skin, breast, prostate, hematologic, and some gynecologic cancers.

However, the picture is complicated. A large review of 48 clinical trials involving more than 94,000 participants treated with GLP-1s found no significant reduction in the overall risk of obesity-related cancers. Other studies have found that GLP-1 use may increase the risk of some cancers. For example, liraglutide use increased the risk of thyroid and respiratory cancer by 70% and 62%, respectively. The AACR report concludes that while the role of these drugs in cancer prevention is promising, it requires further investigation.

What's Next for Cancer Vaccines and Emerging Therapies?

After decades of research and steady progress, preventive and therapeutic cancer vaccines are gaining momentum in clinical settings and represent a promising treatment strategy for many different types of cancer. New technologies are allowing researchers to improve vaccine design and identify new tumor-specific targets, positioning vaccines as a major frontier in cancer treatment.

The AACR report emphasizes that continued progress against cancer will require sustained federal investment in cancer research, encouragement of collaboration across laboratories and disciplines, and support for the next generation of cancer scientists. The organization has issued a call to action urging Congress and other policymakers to protect investments in research and merit-based systems that make progress against cancer possible.