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The worst kind of cancer suddenly isn’t so scary anymore

Scientists have made astonishing progress in treating one of the deadliest cancers.

In a family of killer diseases, pancreatic cancer has long been one of the scariest. It could grow undetected for years, and by the time most people knew something was wrong, their prognosis was grim. The vast majority of patients, nearly 90 percent, would die within the first five years of their diagnosis. Even as other cancers saw their mortality rates drop in recent years, pancreatic cancer’s death rate actually increased slightly from 1999 to 2020.

And despite their best efforts, scientists felt stuck. In the 1980s, they identified a gene, KRAS, that seemed to be pivotal to the uncontrolled cell growth that drove the disease’s development. But over and over again, most treatments in clinical trials failed. Dr. Anirban Maitra, director of NYU Langone’s Laura and Isaac Perlmutter Cancer Center and a longtime pancreatic cancer researcher, told me that pharmaceutical companies came to regard pancreatic cancer as a “graveyard” for future drug development. Experts feared the gene was, in effect, “undruggable,” Maitra said.

But recent breakthroughs have brought what once seemed impossible within reach. A group of researchers is preparing to publish results from their clinical trial, already reported in the New York Times, that found a KRAS-targeting pill called daraxonrasib roughly doubled survival, from seven months to 13 on average, among a group of patients who had metastatic pancreatic cancer and had already tried chemotherapy.

“For the first time, there is some optimism in this disease,” Maitra told me. “Oncologists who have been treating this cancer for decades have always been so pessimistic about the fact that so many trials have failed. These patients, unfortunately, live for a few months and die. But now we finally have the foundation on which to build.”

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Our political wellness landscape has shifted: new leaders, shady science, contradictory advice, broken trust, and overwhelming systems. How is anyone supposed to make sense of it all? Vox’s senior correspondent........

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