Implanted Radiation Tiles Outperform Standard Therapy for Brain Metastases

For years, a quiet failure haunted brain tumor surgery: patients who needed follow-up radiation often never received it, and cancer returned to fill the void. At the 2026 ASCO Annual Meeting, researchers from MD Anderson presented findings from the ROADS trial suggesting that implanting radiation directly into the surgical cavity at the moment of tumor removal may close that gap entirely — reducing local recurrence to near zero and, unexpectedly, more than doubling median overall survival. The results raise a deeper question that medicine is only beginning to ask: what else might we be missing