US drug agency approves breakthrough treatment for pancreatic cancer

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has granted approval to daraxonrasib, sold under the brand name Rasonque by Revolution Medicines, for the treatment of pancreatic cancer. In a late‑stage trial with 500 patients, those who received the oral pill showed a median overall survival of 13.2 months, compared with 6.6 months for patients receiving standard chemotherapy. The FDA described the approval as providing a "critical caller enactment for patients facing an extraordinarily hard and historically hard-to-treat cancer". Daraxonrasib works by locking onto and shutting off the mutated KRAS gene, which is present in more than 90 % of pancreatic tumours and drives their growth. Approximately 67,000 people in the United States are diagnosed with pancreatic cancer each year; the disease carries the highest mortality rate among major cancers, according to the American Cancer Society. Most cases are detected at an advanced stage, and more than half of patients die within three months of diagnosis. In 2025 the FDA awarded the drug a Breakthrough Therapy designation and subsequently approved it six months before the regulatory deadline because it "showed unprecedented results successful an country of precocious unmet need", said Angelo de Claro, manager of the agency’s Oncology Center of Excellence. The most common adverse events were rash, diarrhoea, nausea, fatigue and vomiting; severe side‑effects occurred in 44 % of daraxonrasib‑treated patients versus 57.5 % of those receiving chemotherapy. Former Senator Ben Sasse, who announced in December that he had been diagnosed with Stage