Science deniers who despise medical breakthroughs were handed another loss this week, as an experimental drug called daraxonrasib has been found to double survival in patients with advanced stages of pancreatic cancer. The drug has been been fast-tracked for approval by the Food and Drug Administration reports NBC News:
In April, Revolution Medicines released early findings from its Phase 3 clinical trial of the drug, which found that patients who got daraxonrasib in addition to chemotherapy saw double the survival time compared with patients who just got chemotherapy.
On Wednesday, results from an earlier phase of the clinical trial were published in the New England Journal of Medicine, showing that in patients whose cancer had spread to other parts of the body, daraxonrasib stopped tumors from getting worse for more than eight months and kept patients alive for up to nearly a year and a half.
The results represent an extraordinary advance in treating pancreatic cancer. The disease is usually found only after it’s spread elsewhere in the body. Even with chemotherapy, many patients don’t live more than a year after diagnosis. Just 3% of patients diagnosed with metastatic pancreatic cancer are alive five years later, according to the American Cancer Society.
(Source: NBC News)