Daraxonrasib pill nearly doubles survival in advanced pancreatic cancer trial

A daily pill called daraxonrasib nearly doubled average survival for patients with advanced pancreatic cancer in a large clinical trial presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting in Chicago, the BBC reports. The study compared the drug with standard chemotherapy across hundreds of patients in North America, Europe and Asia. Patients on chemotherapy lived an average of 6.6 months, versus 13.2 months for those taking daraxonrasib.

The drug targets KRAS, a gene mutation present in more than 90% of pancreatic tumours and long viewed as a stubborn driver of cancer growth. In the trial, most participants had tumours with specific KRAS mutations, underlining that the benefit is tied to genetic selection as much as to the pill itself. Side-effects did not disappear: severe adverse events were reported in 43.6% of patients on daraxonrasib, compared with 57.5% on chemotherapy, according to the BBC’s summary of the results.

Pancreatic cancer has one of the bleakest records in oncology because it is often diagnosed late and responds poorly to existing treatments. The BBC cites Cancer Research UK figures of roughly 11,500 diagnoses and about 10,200 deaths a year in Britain, with more than half of patients dying within three months of diagnosis. That arithmetic is part of why any therapy that adds months draws immediate attention: the baseline is so short that incremental gains look dramatic, and the patient population is large enough to make access decisions expensive for health systems.

The trial design also matters for what comes next. A head-to-head comparison against chemotherapy is a higher bar than an uncontrolled early-stage study, and a pill taken daily shifts the practical burden from infusion clinics to outpatient prescribing and monitoring. That can lower delivery costs while raising a different set of questions about who qualifies for testing, how quickly tumour genotyping happens, and whether patients who are too ill to wait for sequencing ever see the drug.

Rachna Shroff of the University of Arizona Cancer Centre called the results “landscape-changing” for metastatic pancreatic cancer patients with a KRAS mutation, the BBC reports. Pancreatic Cancer UK’s Anna Jewell said the priority now is making promising new treatments available in the UK so patients can gain time.

In the trial, 248 patients received daraxonrasib and 252 received chemotherapy. The difference between 6.6 and 13.2 months is the kind of number that turns a research presentation into a procurement question.