A novel pill has helped people with advanced pancreatic cancer live longer, researchers reported, raising hopes of better treatments for one of the deadliest types of cancer.
A novel pill has helped people with advanced pancreatic cancer live longer, researchers reported, raising hopes of better treatments for one of the deadliest types of cancer.
The drug, daraxonrasib, blocks a mutated protein that fuels tumor growth in more than 90% of pancreatic cancer cases. It was tested on 500 patients whose metastatic cancer had quit responding to prior treatment and nearly doubled their survival time, with fewer severe side effects. The findings were published in the New England Journal of Medicine and presented at the American Society for Clinical Oncology meeting.
Those taking daraxonrasib lived for a median of 13.2 months compared with 6.7 months for chemotherapy recipients. While the improvement may seem small, it marked the first drug to show a substantial advantage over chemotherapy. The pills' effects eventually wane but recipients used them for significantly longer than the comparison group stayed on chemotherapy, reporting less pain and a better quality of life as their tumors shrank.
Many still were using the drug after the data was analyzed, which means the survival gap may widen as researchers continue tracking them. The drug should become a new standard of care for previously treated metastatic pancreatic cancer, researchers said, and they will also explore its use earlier in the disease to see if tumor shrinkage might let more patients qualify for surgery.
The Food and Drug Administration plans to expedite review of the drug and is allowing what's called 'expanded access' to the experimental drug for patients who meet certain criteria. The new drug targets mutations in the RAS gene family that normally regulates cell growth and has been harder to tackle than other cancers. Cancer specialists expressed optimism that this may be a turning point in the quest for new options, with dozens of experimental drugs in development.
The new drug uses what's essentially a molecular glue to bind with multiple KRAS subtypes and researchers next will probe whether the drug worked better in certain of those subtypes. Other approaches in earlier stages of testing include vaccines designed to prevent recurrence after pancreatic cancer surgery by teaching the immune system to recognize the mutated protein
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