Matthew Campbell

Yeah, so this week, every year sees that the American Society of Clinical Oncology, the ASCO meeting is held every year.

And this year it's all in Chicago.

And what we're seeing this week is the announcement of clinical trial data, basically, where scientists and medical doctors have been studying the effect of new drugs for treating a whole range of cancers.

And some of the results are actually incredibly exciting.

The first story kind of revolves around this, what they call a smart drug.

And it's a combination immunotherapy.

So basically, people will have heard of immunotherapy.

So basically, drugs that are used in cancer patients to direct the person's immune system to identify the cancer cells and kill them and get rid of them.

And they're incredibly effective.

But for some patients, they don't respond to them.

So the reason they don't respond is that some cancer cells and tumours can produce an enzyme that basically creates this invisibility cloak around the tumours and it doesn't allow the immunotherapy to actually detect and kill the cancer cell.

So what this smart drug basically that was developed in Oxford, what it's done basically is it's designed to suppress the enzyme that creates that invisibility cloak.

So it's a combination of immunotherapy and a drug with the very exciting name of GRWD5769.

So it's basically, this is the concept of the smart drug.

It was a small trial, phase one clinical trial.

They were just looking for safety.

So in phase one clinical trials, you just look for safety, but they actually got efficacy.

Out of 83 patients with a whole range of different cancers, cervical cancer, bladder cancer, liver cancer, out of 83 patients, 15 of those patients saw their tumour shrink by up to 30%.

So these are really, really exciting results for what is essentially a novel form of therapy, but a combination therapy.

So offering real hope to those patients that aren't responding to immunotherapy.