August 26, 2026
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Oncologists are celebrating the FDA approval of Rasonque, a new medication to treat late-stage pancreatic cancer. The image above is a stock photo.
Pancreatic cancer is one of the rarest cancers, but it's also among the deadliest, and oncologists and patients have been desperate for a better treatment.
Though the five-year survival rate for all cancers combined is 70%, the five-year survival rate for pancreatic cancer is 13% – and only 3% of patients whose pancreatic cancer has spread throughout the body live that long. More than 67,000 Americans are expected to be diagnosed with the disease this year, and nearly 53,000 people are expected to die from it, the American Cancer Society reports.
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Treatment for late-stage pancreatic cancer has been lacking, so when promising results of clinical trials involving a novel kind of medication for pancreatic cancer were presented at a conference in May, oncologists in the audience stood up and applauded, according to news reports.
The research involved a medication called daraxonrasib, branded as Rasonque, which attacks pancreatic cancer cells in a new way. Some of the patients with late-stage pancreatic cancer who received the drug lived more than 13 months – roughly double the life expectancy for people with late-stage pancreatic cancer who receive aggressive and debilitating chemotherapy.
On Wednesday, Rasonque received approval from the Food and Drug Administration for people with advanced pancreatic cancer who have already had at least one form of systemic therapy, such as chemotherapy.
"We've never seen a benefit like this," Dr. Anna Berkenblit, the chief scientific and medical officer at the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network, an advocacy group for research and patients, told the New York Times.
Dr. Carla Kurkjian, an oncologist at Mercy Hospital in Oklahoma City, who wasn't involved in the studies, told the Wall Street Journal that Rasonque's approval was "life altering. Not just for patients, as far as helping them extend their lives beyond anything we'd ever seen, but for us as physicians, to be able to have a different conversation than we've had for so long."
Pancreatic cancer notoriously has been hard to treat, because it often evades detection until it is at a later stage. That's because people with the disease may not have symptoms.
Most pancreatic cancer tumors are fueled by cell mutations in the KRAS gene. The proteins generated by these genetic mutations are shaped in ways that have been hard for medications to target, earning them the term "undruggable" by some scientists, the Wall Street Journal reported. But Rasonque is able to shut down the destructive proteins.
Common side effects of the medication, taken as two pills a day, include rash, diarrhea, fatigue and nausea.
Previously, the only patients who have been able to get Rasonque have been those in clinical trials.
Since the research was presented in May, Revolution Medicines, the company that makes Rasonque, established a program that enabled more than 2,000 patients to get access to the medication early. Those patients will be transitioned to insurance coverage of the drug – which will carry a high annual price tag of hundreds of thousands of dollars. But health insurers likely will cover the drug to a greater or lesser degree, the New York Times reported.
Rasonque could hit $20 billion in annual sales if the medication ends up being safe and effective for earlier-stage pancreatic cancer and for other types of cancer, the Wall Street Journal reported.
