June 01, 2026
Source/Image licensed from Ingram Image
A new pancreatic cancer medicine may extend the lives of people with pancreatic cancer longer than chemotherapy, new research suggests. The photo above shows a pancreatic cancer ribbon.
Oncologists are hailing a new pancreatic cancer drug as possibly revolutionary for treatment of the aggressive and often fatal disease.
The medication, called daraxonrasib, blocks a mutated protein that drives the rapid growth of pancreatic cancer tumors. The drug does not cure the disease, but results of a clinical trial show that it could provide an alternative to debilitating chemotherapy and extend the lives of people whose pancreatic cancer has returned, the Associated Press reported.
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The results were published in the New England Journal of Medicine and also presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology's meeting in Chicago on Sunday.
"It's a really remarkable and landmark study," Harsh Singh, the program director of hepatobiliary and pancreas oncology at Mass General Brigham Cancer Institute in Boston, told the Washington Post. "This is possibly the biggest advance we have seen in pancreatic cancer, period."
Scientists have long been chasing better treatment – and a cure – for pancreatic cancer, the third-leading cause of cancer deaths following lung and colorectal cancers. The five-year survival rate for people with pancreatic cancer is just 13%.
The American Cancer Society estimates there will be 67,530 new pancreatic cancer diagnoses and 52,740 deaths this year.
"Having treated pancreatic cancer for 16 years, I actually started crying," Dr. Rachna Shroff, of the University of Arizona Cancer Center in Tucson, told the Associated Press about learning about the clinical trial's findings.
The study involved 500 patients who had had a recurrence or progression of pancreatic cancer after being treated with long-standing protocols, including chemotherapy. Participants in the trial received either daraxonrasib or chemotherapy, with people on the experimental drug living twice as long. Participants who took daraxonrasib lived a median of 13.2 months, compared to people on chemotherapy who lived 6.6 months.
"We've been preparing for this moment for a long time," Mark Goldsmith, chief executive of Revolution Medicines, the pharmaceutical company behind the drug, told the Washington Post. "We've been building out all of the various dimensions that are required to be successful in launching a product in the United States and globally."
Side effects from the drug can be severe but seem not to be as debilitating as those from chemotherapy, the study showed. One patient who was initially getting three doses of daraxonrasib a day experienced severe vomiting but told the Washington Post that when the dose was reduced, the side effects were not as severe as those from chemotherapy.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is making daraxonrasib more widely available while research continues, the Washington Post reported.
