GI Innovation

The red chemotherapy drug from a soil bacterium that is still the backbone of treatment for sarcoma, lymphoma and breast cancer, limited by cumulative heart damage.

A microtubule poison discovered in the Pacific yew tree, among the most used chemotherapies in breast, lung, and ovarian cancer.

Bevacizumab is a humanised antibody that soaks up VEGF-A, the signal tumours use to grow new blood vessels. Approved in 2004, it partners chemotherapy in colorectal, ovarian, cervical, lung, kidney and liver cancer and glioblastoma, and adds to trifluridine/tipiracil in late-line bowel cancer; hypertension, protein in the urine and bleeding are its characteristic side effects.

A sea-sponge-derived chemotherapy that extended survival in heavily pretreated breast cancer and in liposarcoma, where almost nothing else had.

Trastuzumab deruxtecan (Enhertu) is the most successful ADC ever. It redefined HER2 by working in tumours with only tiny amounts of the protein, and in 2026 moved into early-stage breast cancer.

Pembrolizumab is a PD-1 blocking antibody approved in more than 40 settings, from melanoma and lung cancer to the first tumour-agnostic approval for mismatch-repair-deficient tumours in 2017, and before and after surgery in triple-negative breast cancer. A subcutaneous form arrived in 2025, and it is the backbone partner for ADCs and personalised neoantigen vaccines.

An oral anti-angiogenic pill that matched sorafenib in liver cancer with higher response rates, and partners with pembrolizumab in kidney and endometrial cancer.