The FDA Approved A Drug That Doubles Survival Time For Pancreatic Cancer And Doctors Are Calling It A New Era
Pancreatic cancer has the lowest five-year survival rate of any major cancer — around 13 percent. Chemotherapy often fails, tumors grow back, and by the time most patients are diagnosed the cancer is already late stage. On August 26, the US Food and Drug Administration approved a new drug that changes that picture in a meaningful way. The drug is called daraxonrasib, manufactured by Revolution Medicines and sold as Rasonque, and it comes in the form of two pills a day. It is available to patients with metastatic pancreatic cancer who have already been through chemotherapy. In a phase 3 clinical trial in the New England Journal of Medicine, 500 patients received either daraxonrasib or chemotherapy. Median overall survival was 13.2 months in the daraxonrasib group versus 6.6 months in the chemotherapy group. The drug doubled survival time. Some patients lived for years.
The drug works by targeting a specific mutation in the KRAS protein that appears in many pancreatic cancer cases. In those mutations, the KRAS gene gets stuck in the "on" position, telling cancer cells to keep growing indefinitely. Daraxonrasib targets and blocks that signal. "Daraxonrasib is a targeted treatment, not chemotherapy. It works differently by targeting activated KRAS protein in pancreatic cancer cells," said Dr. Kyaw Lwin Aung, a medical oncologist at Baptist Health Herbert Wertheim Cancer Institute who participated in the clinical trial. "We can now envisage a future with no chemotherapy needed for pancreatic cancer patients. This is a remarkable milestone." The KRAS mutation also appears in other cancers, meaning this approval may be the first chapter of something much larger.
