The Other Half of Translation: Why Oncology Innovation Requires a New Focus on Supportive Care

Major oncology meetings this year have underscored a shared reality: scientific progress alone does not define patient progress. As innovation accelerates, the industry’s focus must extend to the broader patient experience.

As novel therapies move from data readouts into clinical reality, ensuring those advances translate into meaningful improvements across the full lived experience of patients is crucial.

Supportive care can no longer be considered a downstream consequence of treatment; it must be recognized as a critical part of innovation itself. As pharmaceutical companies continue to bring increasingly sophisticated therapies to market, those that are most in-tune with real-world patient experiences will be best positioned to maximize the impact of their innovations.

Translating Breakthroughs Into Patient Impact: The “Monday Morning” Question

The 2026 ASCO Annual Meeting centred around the theme “The Science and Practice of Translation,” celebrating advances that continue to redefine what is possible in oncology.

But beneath the buzz of every headline data readout, we often hear a powerful question: what does this mean for patients on Monday morning?

Despite advances in cancer care, up to 50% of patient symptoms can go undetected during routine treatment, highlighting the challenge of understanding what patients are truly experiencing beyond the clinic visit.¹

Trials that set new efficacy standards may represent the culmination of years of scientific development, but the data tell only part of the story. The real test begins once those treatments reach clinical practice and become part of patients’ everyday lives. That, to us, is the other half of translation, the journey that begins where the readout ends.

When Innovation Brings New Supportive Care Needs

The MASCC/ISOO 2026 Annual Meeting brought together the supportive care community under the theme ‘Coordinated and Individualized Supportive Cancer Care.’ The thread connecting the two meetings was simple – novel therapies bring with them novel supportive care needs.

This shift is already evident in the innovation landscape. According to IQVIA, 35% of oncology trials now involve novel modalities such as antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs), cell and gene therapies, and multispecific antibodies, highlighting the increasingly sophisticated treatment approaches entering clinical practice.²

The innovations driving progress in oncology often introduce new administrative and care management challenges when implemented in clinical practice. As treatment options become more complex, so too must our approaches to symptom monitoring, patient support and side effect management. The value of this approach is increasingly supported by evidence. A meta-analysis of 45 clinical trials involving more than 13,600 patients found that integrating patient-reported outcomes into cancer care was associated with improvements in both survival and quality of life.³

Supportive care must evolve alongside innovation. For example, emerging antibody-drug conjugates have introduced new considerations, including ocular adverse events that can affect day-to-day functioning, while ongoing challenges such as pain and fatigue continue to shape patients’ quality of life during treatment. Together, these examples highlight the importance of understanding and supporting the full lived patient while on therapy, not just the disease itself.

AI Can Help Close Supportive Care Gaps

The same focus on understanding the patient experience followed us into discussions around AI, where recent conversations have highlighted a critical reality–the same AI advancements that are reshaping R&D and clinical trial strategies can help to inform improvements in supportive care.

While AI has enormous potential to improve diagnostic accuracy, personalize treatment and support more efficient healthcare delivery, the greatest opportunity lies in AI’s ability to create a more complete picture of the patient experience. By combining evidence from clinical trials with real-world sources such as electronic health records, symptom diaries and patient communities, AI can help uncover unmet needs that may not be fully captured in traditional research settings. For example, analysis of patient-reported experiences across online communities and support forums may reveal recurring themes around fatigue, treatment burden or quality of life that can inform more tailored supportive care strategies and ensure patients are able to stay on treatment.

One Patient Journey, Two Critical Perspectives

Scientific breakthroughs are critical, but they are only part of the story. The ultimate measure of progress is whether those breakthroughs translate into meaningful and sustainable benefit for patients, shaped by their experiences, priorities and quality-of-life outcomes while navigating treatments.

As treatment options become more complex, approaches to symptom monitoring, patient support, and side effect management must evolve alongside them.

Key priorities include:

1. Leveraging AI to aggregate real-world insights and better understand patients’ experiences throughout treatment
2. Embedding supportive care strategies within the broader medical plan for increasingly complex therapies
3. Engaging directly with patients and advocates to ensure clinical trial success is aligned with the patient’s own view of success

Recent conversations across oncology point to two sides of the same story: one focused on what innovative therapies can achieve, the other on what patients need to fully benefit from them. Organizations that successfully connect these perspectives will be best positioned to realize the full value of innovation, both in advancing treatment and improving the patient experience.

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References

1. Basch E, Deal AM, Dueck AC, et al. Overall survival results of a trial assessing patient-reported outcomes for symptom monitoring during routine cancer treatment. JAMA. 2017;318(2):197-198.
2. IQVIA Institute for Human Data Science. Global Oncology Trends 2025: Adopting New Therapies as Modalities Shift and Expenditures Rise. May 2025.
3. Balitsky AK, Rayner D, Britto J, et al. Patient-reported outcome measures in cancer care: an updated systematic review and meta-analysis. JAMA Network Open. 2024;7(8):e2424793.