There’s new hope for one of the world’s deadliest cancers.
Groundbreaking clinical trial results show that an experimental new drug could double survival time for pancreatic cancer patients.
Patients taking the daily pill lived, on average, about six months longer than those who received chemotherapy alone — and had fewer side effects.
“I’ve heard this study described as a home run. I would actually say it’s a grand slam,” Dr. Julie Gralow, chief medical officer and executive vice-president of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, told The Guardian.
And it’s much needed. Pancreatic cancer is among the hardest cancers to diagnose and treat, with just 13% of patients surviving five years after diagnosis.
That number plummets to 3% when the disease is caught at an advanced stage, which happens often since it rarely causes early symptoms and has no routine screening.
In the trial, 500 patients whose pancreatic cancer had spread to distant organs — and who had stopped responding to chemotherapy — were split into two groups getting either chemotherapy or a once-daily oral dose of daraxonrasib.
The drug, manufactured by Revolution Medicines, works by blocking a mutant protein that drives tumor growth in more than 90% of pancreatic cancer patients.
Researchers found that patients on daraxonrasib lived a median of 13.2 months, compared to 6.7 months for those on chemotherapy — and the drug cut the risk of death by 60%.
According to Revolution Medicines, those results have never been reported in any previous Phase 3 clinical trial for the disease.
“These striking results firmly support daraxonrasib as the new standard of care for patients with previously treated metastatic pancreatic cancer,” Dr. Mark A. Goldsmith, the company’s chief executive officer and chairman, said in a statement.
The drug also appeared to be easier to tolerate. Severe side effects were reported by 43.6% of daraxonrasib patients, compared to 57.5% on chemotherapy.
The most common severe side effects were rash, affecting 14% of patients, and mouth sores, affecting 12%. Just 1.2% of daraxonrasib users stopped treatment due to side effects, compared to 11.2% on chemotherapy.
“I think many of us would consider this a big win,” Dr. Brian Wolpin, director of the Hale Family Center for Pancreatic Cancer Research and Gastrointestinal Cancer Center at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, who was not involved in the study, told “Good Morning America.”
“The trial is trying to help people live as long as they can and actually live better with less side effects, less symptoms from the cancer, and that is a very big deal,” he added.
The Food and Drug Administration previously announced that it plans to fast-track its review of daraxonrasib, in part because of the limited treatment options available for pancreatic cancer.
The agency is also allowing what’s called “expanded access” to the treatment for patients who meet certain criteria.
Daraxonrasib made headlines earlier this year when former Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) revealed he was taking it for Stage 4 pancreatic cancer, telling the New York Times in April that the volume of tumors in his torso had dropped by 76%.
The 54-year-old father of three also said he has experienced less pain on the drug, though not without side effects — including “strong waves of desire to puke” and skin left bloody and “bubbling.”
“It causes crazy stuff like my body can’t grow skin and so I bleed all out of a whole bunch of parts of me that shouldn’t be bleeding,” Sasse told the outlet.
But, in December, doctors told him he had three to four months to live.
“I’m at Day 99 or something since then, and I’m doing a heck of a lot better than I was doing at Christmas,” Sasse said.
The momentum building behind daraxonrasib comes as pancreatic cancer rates are increasing across the US, particularly among younger adults and women.
In 2026 alone, the American Cancer Society estimates that 67,530 new cases will be diagnosed, and more than 52,740 people across the country will die from the disease.
