On May 31, at the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) meeting in Chicago, an international study co-led by a UCLA research team reported that patients with pancreatic cancer who took the drug daraxonrasib lived substantially longer, for an average of 13.2 months, compared with 6.6 to 6.7 months for patients who had chemotherapy alone.
This is welcome news, and in anticipation of these results, the FDA, just a month earlier, announced it was granting early access to the drug for selected patients who had failed guideline-directed treatments for this lethal malignancy.
Widespread media coverage of this regulatory pivot in drug access highlights the intense, enduring interest among the general public, as well as in the scientific and medical communities, for identifying treatments that can move the survival needle lethal for complex, heterogeneous malignancies, thereby derailing effective treatment, especially when only single drugs are deployed to improve clinical outcomes.
