The U.S. Food and Drug Administration just approved a new breakthrough drug for pancreatic cancer that significantly extends the lives of people with the disease—considered one of the most intractable and difficult to treat forms of cancer.
The medication is called daraxonrasib and is manufactured by Revolution Medicines; it will be sold as Rasonque and takes the form of a two-pills-a-day regimen. It’s unclear how much the drug will cost.
The FDA approval makes the medication available to people with metastatic pancreatic cancer who have already been through chemotherapy. One of the great challenges of this form of cancer is that more traditional treatments, such as chemotherapy, tend to fail, especially at later stages of the disease. Tumors just stop responding or grow back, even while chemotherapy is ongoing.
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Daraxonrasib could make a radical difference. In a phase 3 clinical trial published earlier this year, 500 patients, most of whom had specific cancer-driving gene mutations and all of whom had previously treated metastatic pancreatic cancer, were assigned to receive daraxonrasib or chemotherapy. In the people with those mutations, median overall survival in the daraxonrasib group was 13.2 months, while the chemotherapy group had a median overall survival rate of 6.6 months. The survival rates were similar for the entirety of the participants (including those without the mutations)—13.2 months and 6.7 months for the daraxonrasib and chemotherapy groups, respectively.
Some patients who got the drug lived for years—something very few people with late-stage pancreatic cancer do. The cancer has the lowest five-year survival rate of any major cancer: around 13 percent.
Revolution Medicines did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Editor’s Note (8/26/26): This is a developing story and may be updated.