Many women with early-stage breast cancer can skip chemotherapy without hurting their odds of beating the disease — good news from a major study that shows the value of a gene-activity test to gauge each patient’s risk.

A new drug therapy available to Irish patients is being hailed as a cure for skin cancer which, up to now, had a very poor prognosis.

Skin cancer sufferers could be cured of the disease with new breakthrough drugs, experts claimed, as they hailed the “beginning of a new era”.