Decades ago, the treatment options for cancer patients could be summed up in three words: cut, burn, poison.

As the Guardian’s health editor, Andrew Gregory, explains, it was a shorthand for the limited choices open to oncologists and their patients – surgery, radiation therapy and chemotherapy – at a time when a cancer diagnosis was often understood to be a death sentence.

But in the time since, billions of dollars have been invested in the development and research of new technologies in the fight against cancer, personalising treatment to individual patients and their tumours in ways unimaginable before, and involving cancer vaccines, new types of immunotherapy and the use of artificial intelligence.

Yet there are still challenges in this new era which some have called a “golden age” of cancer treatment: how to distribute these expensive new technologies to everyone who needs them, and how to treat the increasing number of cancer patients all around the world.

Michael Safi also hears from Abbie Halls, who was first diagnosed with cervical cancer at 27 and took part in a hugely successful clinical trial – one that might just show a more cost-effective way forward in this ongoing medical revolution.