Clinical Updates & Insights

Clinicians and scientists at MSK continue to investigate new ways to improve outcomes for patients with thyroid cancer. Recent research insights from MSK thyroid cancer experts include, the safety and feasibility of active surveillance for certain patients, the identification of mutation profiles of subgroups, recommendations for future clinical trials of redifferentiation therapy, and study results showing that larotrectinib may be beneficial for treatment-naïve patients with NTRK fusion-positive thyroid cancer.

In this Q&A we discuss MSK’s pioneering work in rectal MRI, how it differs from endorectal ultrasound (ERUS), its role in groundbreaking clinical trials for patients with rectal cancer, why expertise matters, and new frontiers for future improvements to rectal MRI.

Event-free survival (EFS) was 27% higher for patients with locally advanced head and neck squamous cell cancer (HNSCC) who received standard-of-care with neoadjuvant and adjuvant pembrolizumab compared to the control group who did not receive the immune checkpoint inhibitor, according to a new study published today in The New England Journal of Medicine.

MSK researchers presented practice-changing advances in new treatment approaches for a range of cancer types at the 2025 ASCO Annual Meeting.Highlights included breakthroughs for patients with advanced gastric cancer, lung cancer, Lynch syndrome-related cancer and salivary gland cancer. Additionally, the first-ever CAR T cell trial for patients with light chain amyloidosis is showing promising results.

Two new therapy options have demonstrated significant advances in survival outcomes for select patients with estrogen receptor (ER)-positive, human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2)-negative advanced breast cancer. Both studies were presented today at the 2025 ASCO Annual Meeting in Chicago and simultaneously published in The New England Journal of Medicine.

As long-term cancer survival outcomes improve, the brain has increasingly become a site of refractory and recurrent disease.

Memorial Sloan Kettering’s Vivian Strong, MD, FACS, addressed peers from around the world in May 2025 at the 16th Annual International Gastric Cancer Congress. Dr. Strong, a surgeon and MSK’s Iris Cantor Chair in Honor of Dr. Sidney Winawer, presented, “Gastric Cancer: A Global Fight for Innovation, the U.S. Perspective,” as the meeting’s Jin Pok Kim Lecturer.

Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK) experts presented their latest advances in oncology research at the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Annual Meeting 2025, held April 25 to 30 in Chicago.

Patients with secondary rectal cancer after radiotherapy for prostate cancer have shorter survival compared with matched treatment-naïve patients. However, a new study by investigators at MSK has found distinct differences in patient characteristics, available treatment options, and tumor biologic characteristics that may explain the gap.

Physician-scientists at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK) recently published two papers that advance the science of addressing critical issues with CAR T cell therapy in patients with relapsed or refractory non-Hodgkin lymphomas, profound immune suppression, and predicting the likelihood of treatment failure.