Partners Summit Therapeutics and Akeso are expected to steal the show at the American Society of Clinical Oncology’s annual conference with data from their potential Keytruda rival, alongside Revolution Medicine’s groundbreaking pancreatic cancer candidate and other assets that could reshape patient care.
The upcoming American Society of Clinical Oncology annual conference will showcase data that could move the needle for some hard-to-treat cancers and those for which advances have been dormant for decades.
Some 40,000 attendees from around the world will gather from May 29 to June 2 at Chicago’s McCormick Place Convention Center to present and discuss the latest innovations in cancer care. The 2026 ASCO meeting will include more than 7,000 abstracts, with studies exploring cutting-edge therapies that experts say could reshape the industry and patient care.
“ASCO 2026 is shaping up to be one of the most exciting meetings in years for gastrointestinal oncology,” Allyson Ocean, a medical oncologist at NewYork-Presbyterian and Weill Cornell Medicine, told BioSpace in an email. “For pancreatic cancer specifically, there is a palpable sense at this year’s ASCO that we may be entering a fundamentally different era.”
Elsewhere, experts are awaiting data on bispecific antibodies, as well as potentially practice-changing presentations in prostate, lung and blood cancers.
Pancreatic cancer in the spotlight
Heading into ASCO 2026, all eyes are on Revolution Medicines and pancreatic cancer.
The company scored a plenary session spot at the conference for the Phase III RASolute 302 trial, evaluating its RAS inhibitor daraxonrasib against chemotherapy in previously treated patients with metastatic pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC). Revolution stunned the cancer world last month when topline data revealed that the pill nearly doubled overall survival, an unprecedented win in a disease with just a 13% 5-year relative survival rate.
“This is a huge moment in pancreas cancer,” said Meredith Pelster, associate director of Gastrointestinal Cancer Research at Sarah Cannon Research Institute, who is an investigator on the RASolute trial but not an author on the plenary abstract. “You can feel the excitement.”
Daraxonrasib is an oral drug that targets RAS mutations, common in PDAC, non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) and colorectal cancer. Patients in RASolute taking daraxonrasib had a median overall survival of 13.2 months, compared to 6.7 months for those on chemotherapy, according to Revolution’s press release. The company’s shares rallied 40% the day of the announcement.
Additional RASolute data will be presented on Sunday, and experts are eager for information on the depth of the response, results based on patients’ specific mutations, and more. Pelster is looking to learn more about toxicities, after earlier data showed that the vast majority of patients developed a rash and around 30% had serious side effects.
“We just want to understand that, so that we can counsel the patients and know how to manage it appropriately,” Pelster told BioSpace in an interview.
Adding to the buzz around the gastrointestinal space is the deployment of blood tests for circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) to help manage patient care. A notable late-breaker will discuss the CIRCULATE trial, which tested using ctDNA to guide decisions for adjuvant treatment in stage II colon cancer. The strategy could spare some patients unnecessary chemotherapy while flagging others who might need more treatment, Ocean said.
This year’s ASCO reflects a broader shift toward biomarker-driven precision oncology for gastrointestinal cancers, Ocean said. Other anticipated presentations in the space include trials looking at Pfizer’s Braftovi plus cetuximab and chemotherapy in colorectal cancer, Shanghai KeChow Pharma’s Tunlametinib plus vemurafenib in colorectal cancer, and Incyte’s Pemazyre in bile-duct cancer.
Bispecifics and HARMONi-6
For Leerink Partners analyst Daina Graybosch, the focus is on bispecific antibodies, particularly the Keytruda rival ivonescimab, in development by Summit Therapeutics and its Chinese partner Akeso.
Akeso’s closely watched Phase III trial HARMONi-6 also claimed a spot in ASCO’s plenary session. The trial puts the PD-1/VEGF bispecific ivonescimab plus chemotherapy up against BeOne Medicines’ Tevimbra plus chemotherapy as first-line treatment for patients with advanced squamous NSCLC. The session comes on the heels of positive progression-free survival (PFS) data presented at the European Society for Medical Oncology Congress in October 2025. Median PFS was 11.14 months for patients treated with the ivonescimab combo compared to 6.9 months in the comparator group.
“The big debate is, what does this look like in overall survival?” Graybosch, senior managing director of immuno-oncology at Leerink, said in an interview with BioSpace. That answer will help determine where ivonescimab and other bispecifics fit in the treatment landscape, she said.
“For me, it’s: How much better than Keytruda is it going to be?” Graybosch added. “Then, what does that mean in terms of who is going to have sustainable revenues from a bispecific?”
Ivonescimab has the potential to shake up the therapeutic status quo, in which Merck’s blockbuster PD-1 inhibitor Keytruda currently reigns supreme. The asset grabbed attention when it bested Keytruda in a China-only trial in 2024 in advanced NSCLC. But more recent global trials have missed their marks on PFS overall survival, tempering expectations and raising questions about ivonescimab’s global potential.
This puts even more pressure on the overall survival data for HARMONi-6, a China-only trial, that will be presented this weekend, Graybosch said. “If you believe that the data is going to degrade in effect from China to a global study, you need to see a really impressive result in China.”
Other companies are also showcasing data on PD-1/VEGF bispecifics this weekend. Bristol Myers Squibb and BioNTech have Phase 2 data in NSCLC and Phase 2/3 data in colorectal cancer for their bispecific PD-1/VEGF-A inhibitor pumitamig. Pfizer, meanwhile, has updated Phase 2 data for its PD-1/VEGF bispecific antibody in patients with NSCLC.
Practice-changing potential
In addition to RASolute302 and HARMONi-6, the other plenary session slots at this year’s ASCO have the potential to shift practice for both common and rare cancers, experts said.
One such trial could help determine whether oncologists should add Johnson & Johnson’s androgen receptor inhibitor ERLEADA before and after surgery for patients with high-risk localized prostate cancer. The LIBRETTO-432 trial will analyze event-free survival with Eli Lilly’s Retevmo in stage IB-IIIA RET fusion-positive NSCLC in the adjuvant setting, to see whether the drug should move from advanced to earlier-stage disease. And the Phase III SARC041 trial is testing Lilly’s CDK4 inhibitor Verzenio in a rare, difficult-to-treat sarcoma called dedifferentiated liposarcoma (DDLS).
Another notable late-breaker with the potential to change practice is a Phase III study of Incyte’s anti-CD19 monoclonal antibody Monjuvi/Minjuvi plus lenalidomide and R-CHOP chemotherapy vs. current R-CHOP standard of care in newly diagnosed patients with diffuse large B cell lymphoma (DLBCL).
“The first-line treatment of diffuse large B cell lymphoma has not been changed for a couple of decades,” Andres Sirulnik, head of the Hematology Clinical Development Unit at Regeneron, told BioSpace. “People are waiting to see the results.”
Regeneron is presenting its own data in frontline DLBCL, an early readout of its bispecific antibody Ordspono plus chemotherapy in the Phase III OLYMPIA-3 trial. The treatments could offer patients a shorter, less cumbersome regimen, Sirulnik said. “We are hoping that this also will translate to better outcomes.”
