Welcome back to Healthy Innovations! 👋

ASCO, the world's biggest oncology meeting, was held earlier this month, and the plenary sessions delivered genuinely exciting science across pancreatic, lung, and skin cancers. Those advances were covered extensively, so what I want to share here are the smaller studies that don't make a press release but quietly rewrite what we thought we knew. So this week, I am highlighting those.

Let's dive in!

In 2021, Terri Swain-Collins went in for what was supposed to be a routine colonoscopy and came out with life rerouted: stage 3 colon cancer. After surgery and chemotherapy, her oncologist offered her a spot in a clinical trial that would later become one of the most talked-about presentations in oncology.

Terri didn't get a breakthrough molecule. She got a personal trainer. Three years on, she's cancer-free and still walking several times a week.

The study – CHALLENGE – was one of the quiet threads running through this year's meeting, but it deserved far more attention than it got.

Last year, CHALLENGE showed that a structured exercise program after chemotherapy reduced the risk of recurrence or death by 28% in stage 3 colon cancer – and reduced the risk of death by 37%. This year's follow-up asked the question oncology rarely prioritizes: what happens to total health-system costs once the downstream consequences are counted.

The intervention was almost disarmingly simple: a three-year exercise program supported by a physical-activity consultant twice a month. And it landed with a result that modern oncology almost never delivers. Total healthcare spending (including the program itself) was lower in the exercise group than in the control group, driven by less spending on recurrence and on later anticancer therapy. Patients gained an average of 0.10 quality-adjusted life years at lower overall cost – not higher.

If you've ever tried to get a personal trainer reimbursed by insurance, that inversion is the point. Most innovations in cancer care buy survival by adding expense. This one improved outcomes while reducing spend, by a margin that looks even starker next to the price tag of a contemporary cancer drug.

CBM588 has been sitting on Japanese pharmacy shelves for decades as an over-the-counter probiotic. It's a live bacterial product, Clostridium butyricum, and almost nobody expected it to show up in a kidney cancer trial.

In two early-stage City of Hope trials, adding CBM588 capsules to standard immunotherapy combinations in metastatic kidney cancer was associated with a 69.2% objective response rate, against 20% for patients on standard therapy alone, plus a median progression-free survival of 33 months against 3.7 months. "We showed quite a profound progression-free survival response with patients who received the live bacterial product," said Dr. Rahul Winayak, the postdoctoral research fellow at City of Hope who presented the work.

The most intriguing signal sits inside that headline number.

Researchers used a metagenomic gut health score called TOPOSCORE to flag which patients had the most disrupted gut bacteria going in, and an exploratory subgroup analysis suggests this group saw the largest benefit of anyone in the trial. The researchers themselves say this needs confirmation in the planned phase 3 trial before it means anything beyond a promising lead. The working theory is that a healthier gut microbiome helps immune cells prime properly before they ever reach the tumor, and that the most disrupted guts simply have the most room to improve.

GLP-1 receptor agonists, the same drug class behind Ozempic and Wegovy, turned into one of the most-discussed undercurrents of this year's meeting almost by accident. A retrospective study from Ontada examined patients across six cancer types, including breast, prostate, colorectal, and renal cell carcinoma, and found GLP-1 use was associated with a 34% reduction in mortality.

A separate Cleveland Clinic analysis matched patients across seven solid tumors and found GLP-1 exposure cut the rate of progression to metastatic disease in four cancer types: lung, breast, colorectal, and liver. High GLP-1 receptor expression on the tumor itself was tied to better survival, most notably in breast cancer.

Ontada's Jessica Paulus, who led the mortality study, was careful at ASCO to flag what this isn't: a causal trial. The leading theories range from reduced inflammation and better glycemic control to a more interesting possibility, that shrinking the body's fat tissue burden lets other cancer treatments work better.

Nobody set out to study Ozempic as a cancer drug. The data simply kept turning up because so many oncology patients are already taking it for diabetes or weight management, and now multiple independent groups are looking at the same signal from different angles.

Cancer survivors are often hit with a bundle of symptoms – low mood, fatigue, anxiety, and insomnia – that feed into one another. Yet there hasn't been a single, evidence-backed behavioral option that reliably improves all four at once. A phase 3 randomized trial called YOCAS tested a four-week program of gentle hatha and restorative yoga against that gap, and it delivered: participants saw measurable improvements in mood, fatigue, anxiety, and sleep – without medication.

What makes YOCAS stand out from the usual "yoga helps with stress" headline is the way the team analyzed the results. Instead of treating each symptom as a separate outcome, they modeled how shifts in mood, anxiety, and fatigue helped drive the gains in insomnia – capturing the reinforcing loop that makes survivorship so hard to manage. The group is now building a digital version (including an app) designed for adolescent and young adult survivors, who are among the least likely to access an in-person studio or group program.

A bacterial capsule, a yoga class, and a personal trainer don't carry the budget or the drama of a new targeted therapy, and on their own, none of the four studies here is practice-changing yet. Even the GLP-1 signal, despite riding on a drug class with serious commercial weight behind it, is still an association in search of a mechanism.

But put side by side, they point to where some of the most interesting oncology thinking is heading. For a field that's spent decades chasing the next molecule, that's a meaningfully different list of places to look.

🔍 Elicit is an AI research assistant built for exactly the part of academic work nobody enjoys: wading through papers to find what's relevant. Type a question in plain language, and it surfaces matching studies, then pulls out structured details, methods, sample sizes, outcomes, into comparison tables you'd otherwise build by hand. It's particularly suited to systematic reviews and evidence synthesis, handling title and abstract screening and full-text extraction along the way.

Backed by a recent funding round and several years of development, it's a genuine workflow tool rather than a novelty. Worth a look if you're regularly working through primary literature and want the evidence organized before you read a single full paper.

💎 Bling that bites back at the sun. Forget the SPF reminders from your mum. The90 Gem is a pendant necklace that tracks your actual UV exposure in real time, measuring both UVA rays (the deep-penetrating, aging kind) and UVB rays (the burning kind) as you go about your day. Pair the sensor with a "skin profile" in its app, where you log your sunscreen and clothing habits, and it'll estimate your time-to-burn, tally your cumulative exposure, and nudge you on when to reapply or just get inside already.

What makes it stand out isn't the tech, similar UV sensors have existed for years, it's the design. Most competitors look like a clunky sensor you clip to a hat or jacket; this one looks like actual jewelry, with a simple charm finish and a standard pendant loop so you can swap it onto your own chain. Vanity and vitamin D, finally reconciled in something you'd actually want to wear.

Thank you for reading the Healthy Innovations newsletter!

Keep an eye out for next week’s issue, where I will highlight the healthcare innovations you need to know about.

Have a great week!

Alison ✨

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