FDA Approves Daraxonrasib, First Drug to Directly Attack Pancreatic Cancer's Genetic Driver

The FDA approved a new pancreatic cancer drug this week. That sentence alone is news, because pancreatic cancer rarely gives anyone reason to write it.

The drug is daraxonrasib, sold as Rasonque. It's a pill, taken for previously treated metastatic pancreatic cancer. In the phase 3 RASolute 302 trial, patients on it lived almost twice as long as patients on standard chemotherapy.

For decades, the gene driving most pancreatic cancer, mutant KRAS, was called undruggable. Not hard to treat. Undruggable. Daraxonrasib works by blocking the "on" state of RAS proteins directly, a mechanism that only became chemically possible in the last few years.

Five-year survival for pancreatic cancer has sat in the single digits for as long as anyone has been tracking it. This drug doesn't fix that number overnight. But it's one of the first genomically targeted therapies to actually move the needle in a cancer this stubborn, and it adds to a growing list of RAS-pathway drugs finally delivering on years of research that, for a long time, went nowhere.

Source: STAT News — FDA approves new pancreatic cancer drug expected to usher in new era of treatment