Pancreatic-head tumours (red, artificially coloured) have proven highly resistant to treatment, but a new drug nearly doubles the lifespan of people with this type of cancer.Credit: PNMB/Science Photo Library The experimental drug, daraxonrasib, disarms all three members of the RAS family of proteins, which are linked to some of the deadliest cancers. Designing drugs that target the RAS proteins has been notoriously challenging. But a large clinical trial has found that daraxonrasib nearly doubled survival ' from 6.7 months to 13.2 months ' in people with a form of advanced pancreatic cancer. The results were presented to a packed room at the American Society of Clinical Oncology annual meeting in Chicago, Illinois on 31 May, and published in the New England Journal of Medicine1. At the conference, the talk was met with a long standing ovation, says Ecaterina Dumbrava, an oncologist at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. 'After more than a decade without...
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