Cancer Prevention Is About to Change: Here's What Experts Say Is Coming in 2026

Cancer prevention is shifting from waiting for disease to develop to treating the risk itself before cancer ever appears. Leading oncology experts forecast that 2026 will mark a pivotal year where artificial intelligence (AI), blood-based screening, and early intervention strategies converge to fundamentally change how we approach cancer prevention and detection.

What Does "Treating Cancer Risk" Actually Mean?

Dr. William Hait, former global head of Janssen Research and Development and American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Chief Scientific Advisor, explains this paradigm shift through a simple patient question he heard repeatedly during his 30 years practicing medical oncology: "I didn't smoke, I didn't drink, no one in my family has cancer. What could I have done to prevent this?" This question drives his vision for 2026—moving upstream to understand what causes cancer and treating those causes before disease develops.

"To prevent a disease, we have to know what causes it, and the translation of that research would be into not treatments as we know them today—treatment of established disease—but treatment of a risk, to reduce the risk," said Hait. This approach, called interception, involves identifying and treating measurable biological changes that occur long before cancer becomes detectable.

Which Pre-Cancer Conditions Will Be Treated in 2026?

The concept of cancer interception is already showing results. Multiple myeloma, a cancer that begins in plasma cells (a type of white blood cell), provides the clearest example. Researchers identified a pre-cancerous condition called monoclonal gammopathy of undetermined significance (MGUS), which can progress to smoldering myeloma and eventually full multiple myeloma.

In November 2025, the drug daratumumab (Darzalex) received approval for treating high-risk smoldering myeloma—marking a 15-year journey from research to regulatory approval. "We now have approved drugs for the treatment of smoldering myeloma to intercept the process before you are ever diagnosed with the fatal form," Hait noted.

For 2026, experts expect similar interception strategies to expand to other pre-cancerous conditions:

• Barrett Esophagus: A condition where stomach acid damages the esophagus lining, increasing esophageal cancer risk
• Prostate Intraepithelial Neoplasia: Abnormal cell growth in the prostate that can lead to prostate cancer
• Clonal Hematopoiesis of Indeterminate Potential (CHIP): Blood cell changes that increase the risk of blood cancers

How Will AI Transform Cancer Screening?

Artificial intelligence is addressing one of screening's biggest challenges: distinguishing between harmless abnormalities and those requiring immediate attention. Lung cancer screening with low-dose computed tomography (CT) scans has proven life-saving, but doctors often struggle to determine which lung nodules seen on scans need medical intervention versus those that are benign.

Hait sees AI-powered radiomics—using data science to extract detailed information from medical images—as the solution. This technology can analyze scan features invisible to the human eye, reducing false positives and unnecessary procedures while catching dangerous nodules earlier.

Blood-based tests, often called liquid biopsies, are also improving through machine learning. "Liquid biopsies will improve with time, the more data that we generate, the more that we can apply machine learning to understand which signal is really a serious signal, not a false positive," Hait explained. However, he cautioned that pinpointing where tumor cells in the blood originate remains challenging and requires pairing blood tests with other localization strategies.

What About Precision Treatment Advances?

Dr. Keith Flaherty, AACR President-Elect and Director of Clinical Cancer Research at Mass General Cancer Center, predicts 2026 will bring "novel chemistry advances that will help with early interception of cancer." These include new classes of molecules called chemical inducers of proximity (CIPs), which work differently from traditional cancer drugs.

Rather than simply blocking or destroying proteins, CIPs like proteolysis-targeting chimeras (PROTACs), bispecifics, and molecular glues bring specific proteins together to selectively change how they function. This precision approach could be particularly valuable for treating pre-cancerous conditions where complete protein destruction might be unnecessary or harmful.

The shift toward prevention requires changes beyond the laboratory. "We need more serious effort to credential surrogate endpoints in earlier disease, such as biomarker responses and circulating tumor DNA assessments, so trials can act on reliable predictors rather than waiting for overall survival where it is impractical," said Hait. This means developing ways to measure treatment success in pre-cancer stages without waiting years to see if cancer develops.

Hait's long-term vision captures the magnitude of this shift: "A hundred years from now, they're going to look back at us and say, could you believe our ancestors used to wait until they got a disease before they did anything about it?" For 2026, his prescription is clear: fund research into cancer causes, normalize treating pre-cancer conditions, deploy smarter screening with AI and blood tests, and build healthcare systems that reward preventing disease rather than just treating it.