Nature in a experiment.

Why is blight so far?

Like it sounds so simple.

They had no idea.

But now the data's...

I find this not only refreshing, but at some level astounding.

Nature.

Welcome back to the nature podcast. This week, the effectiveness of off-label cancer therapies, and an ancient genome study, capturing human evolution in action.

I'm Benjamin Thompson.

First up on the show this week, we've got a story about a nature paper that's pulled together

and published 10 years of data from a massive Dutch cancer therapy trial.

Specifically, this trial has been looking at the effects of off-label treatments, where a cancer

therapy is used to attempt to treat a disease other than the one it was designed and approved

for. And there are reasons why drugs might be used

off-label. Perhaps a person's cancer didn't respond to any of the approved treatments, so options are

limited. Or perhaps they have a rare type of cancer, and there aren't many treatment options in the

first place. There have been examples where results from

this approach have been positive, and estimates suggest it's happening with some regularity,

although numbers differ from country to country. The decision on which drugs to try is usually

informed by similarities between the types of cancer involved. For example, doctors might

select a drug designed to treat a cancer in a completely different part of the body, but which

shares the same genetic profile as the one in the patient. Perhaps they share a similar mutation

...