How to keep up with cancer immunotherapy

I read a lot of cancer immunotherapy news, because we make a free monthly roundup on it. It's one of the most interesting fields I know, and one of the hardest to keep up with. This is what I've learned about doing it without it taking over your month.

The short answer: pick a small number of sources you trust, check them at a regular time, and write down why something mattered when you save it. Most of this guide is about why that's harder in cancer immunotherapy than it sounds, and the ways people usually go about it.

Why is cancer immunotherapy hard to keep up with?

Mostly because the news comes from several different places. There are trial readouts, regulatory decisions, journal papers, company announcements and deals. They also cover very different kinds of work, from checkpoint combinations and cell therapies to biomarkers, resistance and manufacturing.

Look at September. Merck and Moderna reported positive phase 3 results for an individualised neoantigen therapy in melanoma. The FDA approved belzutifan plus lenvatinib after previous PD-1 or PD-L1 treatment in clear-cell kidney cancer. Atezolizumab did not produce a statistically significant benefit in a large neoadjuvant triple-negative breast cancer trial. AstraZeneca invested $2 billion in Summit Therapeutics for immune-oncology combinations, and GSK agreed to acquire a trispecific myeloma engager for up to $750 million.

The headline is often less clear than the result underneath it. The melanoma announcement met its recurrence-free survival endpoint, but it didn't yet show the size or durability of the benefit. The atezolizumab result also had exploratory subgroup signals, alongside the negative main result and substantial treatment-related toxicity. Both need a careful read.

How do people usually keep up?

Most people use some mix of these:

• Newsletters. Good for a monthly or weekly overview, because somebody else has done the selecting. The catch is that their selection may not match your tumour type, modality or stage of research.
• Journal alerts and preprint feeds. The closest you get to new primary research. They're also noisy, and it takes tuning before you stop seeing papers that aren't useful to your work.
• Podcasts. Easy to fit into a commute, and good for context around a trial or deal. Less good for checking an endpoint, a hazard ratio or a safety detail later.
• Conferences and meetings. Often the quickest way to hear about trial readouts and work that hasn't been published yet. They only happen at particular times, so they can't be your only source.
• Colleagues and communities. Often how the most useful papers and readouts reach you. It works until the person who normally sends them is busy, or everyone is following the same headline.

None of them covers everything, so most people end up with a patchwork.

What tends to work

• Keep the list short. Three or four sources you trust are better than fifteen you feel guilty about. If one hasn't given you anything useful in a month, drop it.
• Pick a time. Twenty minutes on the same day each week, or a longer session once a month, works better than catching up whenever you can.
• Write one line when you save something. Why it matters to your work, in a sentence. A bare link rarely gets looked at again.
• Go back to the source for anything you'll act on. A summary tells you what something is about. For the exact endpoint, population, effect size or caveat, read the original.

That's most of it. It takes discipline, and in a field with new data, approvals and company moves arriving together, it's hard to keep up for long.

One more option

This is why I built Iris. You describe your work in your own words, something like "checkpoint combinations and resistance biomarkers in solid tumours", and each month it reads across the field and writes you a briefing on what changed for you, with every source linked so you can check anything yourself.

It's one option, and a good routine with a couple of newsletters works well too. If you'd like to see what the general version looks like first, our free monthly podcast, Keeping up with Cancer Immunotherapy is about five minutes on the month's biggest stories, with the written report and every source underneath. When you'd like one built around your own work, you can set up your own briefing.

If you work in cancer immunotherapy and think I've missed something, I'd like to hear about it: joe@irisbriefings.com.