<b><strong>A New Medication May Double the Survival Time for Pancreatic Cancer Patients</strong></b>

Reported by Women's Health Magazine.

Pancreatic cancer is one of medicine's most stubborn tragedies. The overall five-year survival rate sits at just 13 percent — and for stage IV disease, which represents the majority of diagnoses, that number collapses to three percent. "Stage IV pancreatic cancer has historically had a very poor prognosis," says Shubham Pant, MD, a gastrointestinal oncologist at MD Anderson Cancer Center. But according to Women's Health Magazine, a new experimental drug called daraxonrasib is doing something researchers haven't seen before: nearly doubling how long patients live.

In a 500-person global trial presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology's annual meeting, patients with metastatic pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma who had already gone through chemotherapy were split into two groups. Those who received daraxonrasib survived an average of 13.2 months. Those who continued on chemo? About 6.6 to 6.7 months. The gap is stark — and so is the quality-of-life difference. Only 44 percent of the daraxonrasib group experienced serious side effects compared to 57.5 percent on chemo, and just 1.2 percent of daraxonrasib patients had to stop treatment entirely, versus 11.2 percent of the chemotherapy group. "We have never seen results of this caliber in pancreatic cancer treatment," says Ignacio Garrido Laguna, MD, PhD, chair of early therapeutics development at Moffitt Cancer Center.

What Makes Daraxonrasib Different

This isn't just another incremental update to the chemo playbook. Daraxonrasib is an oral pill — not an infusion — and it works by targeting and switching off the KRAS protein, which drives cancer growth regardless of whether a patient carries a specific mutation in that protein. That matters enormously because, as Peter Hosein, MD, associate director for clinical research at Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center's Pancreatic Cancer Research Institute, explains, more than 90 percent of pancreatic cancers are fueled by a KRAS mutation. Other approved drugs target only the G12C subtype of KRAS — a relatively rare variant. Daraxonrasib can inhibit any KRAS subtype, making it "the first drug in this class of 'panRAS' inhibitors to show success in a large phase 3 study," Dr. Hosein says.

Still, oncologists are careful not to overclaim. The drug is not yet FDA-approved, and it is not a cure. "Eventually, pancreatic cancers will become resistant to the therapy," warns Brandon Huffman, MD, a medical oncologist at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute — though he does call daraxonrasib "a really critical and promising first step" in blocking the disease's primary growth driver. The deeper problem remains detection: most patients aren't diagnosed until the cancer is already advanced, leaving little room for curative intervention even as treatments improve.

Revolution Medicines, the company behind the drug, has launched an expanded access program while FDA review is pending — meaning any U.S. oncologist can apply on behalf of an eligible patient right now. If pancreatic cancer has touched your life or someone you love, the conversation to have is with an oncologist, today.

Daraxonrasib won't cure pancreatic cancer yet, but it's the most meaningful leap forward the field has seen — and for patients out of options, more time is everything.

Read the original at Women's Health Magazine.