Jay Shankar
June 9, 2026: A new oral drug called daraxonrasib, developed by Revolution Medicines and tested in a global Phase 3 trial, has nearly doubled survival time for patients with advanced pancreatic cancer by successfully targeting a gene mutation that scientists had considered impossible to treat for over four decades.
The drug was presented at the ASCO meeting in Chicago recently.
Pancreatic cancer has long been one of medicine’s most brutal puzzles. For patients diagnosed with metastatic pancreatic cancer between 2015 and 2021, about 97% died within five years of their diagnosis. It rarely announces itself early, has no reliable screening tests, and by the time most patients are diagnosed, the disease has already spread.
Only 13 per cent of people are alive five years after diagnosis. Those are the odds doctors and patients have been living with for decades. And pancreatic cancer killed more than 50,000 Americans last year alone.
The Villain Behind the Curtain: KRAS
More than 90% of pancreatic tumours are driven by mutations in a gene called KRAS — one that codes for proteins functioning as switches that turn cell growth on and off. When the KRAS gene mutates, the switch becomes permanently stuck in the “on” position, commanding cancer cells to multiply endlessly.
Scientists knew this as far back as the early 1980s. The problem? The KRAS protein had no obvious place for a drug molecule to latch onto. Scientists started calling it “undruggable” — not as a permanent verdict, but as an honest acknowledgment of how difficult the problem was.
So for forty years, treatment stayed stuck in the blunt-instrument era — chemotherapy, with all its toxicity and limited results.
The Breakthrough: A “Molecular Glue”
Enter daraxonrasib. Instead of trying to block the KRAS protein directly, the drug uses what researchers call a “molecular glue” mechanism, essentially gluing a helper protein onto the mutant KRAS and locking it in an “off” position, so it can no longer send the growth signals that fuel the cancer. This approach sidesteps the slippery-surface problem entirely, and it works across multiple types of KRAS mutations, not just one.
Daraxonrasib belongs to a new class of therapies known as RAS(ON) multi-selective inhibitors. It is taken as a simple once-daily oral pill — a meaningful detail for patients already burdened by hospital visits and intravenous chemotherapy regimens
The Phase 3 trial results were applauded at the presentation. The data warranted the response.
Median overall survival was 13.2 months for patients on daraxonrasib, compared to 6.7 months with the standard chemotherapy, effectively doubling survival time. The drug also reduced the risk of death by 60% in patients with RAS G12–mutant disease, and tripled the objective response rate compared with chemotherapy.
At 12 months, 53.3% of patients on daraxonrasib were still alive, compared to just 18.7% on chemotherapy.
Dr Brian M. Wolpin of Harvard Medical School and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, the trial’s principal investigator, said: “For patients with metastatic pancreatic cancer, new treatment options are urgently needed to increase survival time and improve quality of life.”
ASCO gastroenterology expert Dr Rachna Shroff called the results “landscape-changing” and said when she received the press release, “I started crying in the clinic.”
What Comes Next
The immediate next step is regulatory review. Revolution Medicines will use these findings to seek formal approval from the FDA and other global regulatory bodies. Because advanced pancreatic cancer is notoriously difficult to treat, breakthrough therapies demonstrating this level of survival benefit are often granted expedited or priority review.
This is not a cure. But for patients who had run out of options after first-line chemotherapy, a drug that doubles survival time and comes in a pill you take at home is, by every reasonable measure, a turning point.
The results were also published in The New England Journal of Medicine
