The Breakthrough and the Bill
On Sunday 31 May, in front of an audience of oncologists at the American Society of Clinical Oncology's annual meeting in Chicago, a Californian biotechnology company named Revolution Medicines presented Phase 3 trial results for an experimental pill called daraxonrasib. The drug had been tested against standard chemotherapy in five hundred patients with advanced pancreatic cancer whose disease had progressed despite earlier treatment. Patients on the pill lived a median of 13.2 months. Patients on chemotherapy lived 6.7. The risk of death was reduced by sixty percent. It is the first drug ever to push median survival past one year in a Phase 3 pancreatic cancer trial, in any line of therapy. The findings were published the same day in The New England Journal of Medicine. They are real, and they matter. What follows is also real, and it also matters.
Pancreatic cancer kills roughly fifty-two thousand Americans every year and the great majority of the sixty-seven thousand newly diagnosed. The five-year survival rate has long sat in single digits. For decades, drug development against the disease has been a sequence of expensive failures.