FDA approves breakthrough drug to treat advanced pancreatic cancer
Yesterday, the FDA approved a drug, daraxonrasib, “that could extend the survival of those with metastatic pancreatic cancer. A late-stage clinical trial with 500 patients showed that the median overall survival nearly doubled to more than 13 months versus a median survival of about 6.7 months for those being treated with standard chemotherapy.”
The drug is a daily pill that “targets multiple forms of a protein called RAS, which is a main driver of tumor growth.”
The drug was approved under the FDA “Commissioner’s National Priority Voucher Program, initiated by former FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary,” who served from 2025 to 2026. “The review time was accelerated from 12 months to 10 months. There is hope that this new type of targeted treatment will show benefits for other hard-to-treat cancers.”
A new blood test can detect which bowel cancer patients can receive lifesaving immunotherapy rather than chemotherapy, enabling them to be cancer free after surgery.
And a $949 blood test can screen you for up to 50 cancers.
The world’s first blood test for brain cancer may raise survival rates if it becomes widely available.
An mRNA vaccine saves the lives of pancreatic cancer patients, but it has yet to be approved by the FDA. A cancer researcher recently home-brewed a beer that works as a vaccine.
The fact that a life-saving test is developed doesn’t mean it will be available to the public quickly. Many people die waiting for the FDA to approve medical tests and life-saving drugs. The FDA can be rather slow. The FDA didn’t approve a home test for HIV until 24 years after it first received an application. According to an FDA advisory committee, the test held “the potential to prevent the transmission of more than 4,000 new HIV infections in its first year of use alone.” That means thousands of people likely got infected with AIDS as a result of the delay in approving it. As Roger Parloff noted in Fortune, the FDA’s delay in approving the home HIV test was a “scandal.” It caused the deaths of thousands of people.
