medicine
A twice-daily pill doubled pancreatic cancer survival
For years the protein was called untargetable. Then a pill grabbed it.
Pancreatic cancer patients whose chemotherapy has failed now have a twice-daily pill that doubled their survival in a phase 3 trial, from seven months to more than 13. The drug, daraxonrasib, won FDA approval after a 35-day review and is largely covered by insurance. Made by Revolution Medicine, it targets a protein called KRAS, long thought untargetable because of its smooth surface. When the results were presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting in Chicago in May, some physicians stood and applauded with tears in their eyes. "I have not seen anything like that before in trials we have run in pancreatic cancer," said Dr. Brian Wolpin of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, who led the study. "I just kept repeating, 'Wow.'" One man in his 70s, who joined the trial in 2022 after his cancer spread to his lymph nodes, now shows no visible tumors on scans. The same KRAS approach is being tested in colon and lung cancers.