Of course this is better than nothing, but it is not a cure.
Moreover, the link provided by another poster to an article that discusses the side effects, shows that they are unpleasant.
Still, an extra year of life may provide a chance to survive until the appearance of a better solution.
> ...
> He’s been on daraxonrasib since early this year, and describes it this way: “. . .it’s a nasty drug. It causes crazy stuff like my body can’t grow skin and so I bleed all out of a whole bunch of parts of me that shouldn’t be bleeding” If you go to that link above, be prepared, because he also looks like he’s had aqua regia thrown all over him (and apparently feels a bit like that, too). But his tumor volume has gone down by about 75%, and there’s a very strong chance that he wouldn’t still be alive at all without having gone on the drug.
But to me, that doesn’t sound like a life worth living. Obviously different people will have different thresholds for when to throw in the towel, and I’m glad that we are finding medicines to allow people to make the choices that align with their own drives.
Still, I can’t help but think that this is the sort of life virtually none of us would choose to inflict on our pets, even if cost was no option. We give them a far more graceful exit from this world than we give ourselves, and I think that’s worth considering.
I am truly terrified of death. I wish I wasn’t, but an infinity of nonexistence somehow seems unbearable (though, obviously, it will be trivial to bear in practice). I still hope that when my time comes, I will find the strength to exit gracefully if my life ever gets to the point where each day is filled with pain and discomfort, and where I can’t actually take part in any of the things I enjoy about life.
I hope that this is only a temporary treatment for this guy to get the tumor to a point where it can be operated on or treated with other therapies. Because his life sounds like a living hell and that breaks my heart.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemotherapy-induced_acral_ery...>
I'd first run across this decades ago in the context of FDA drugs trials, in which adverse incidents were noted. My understanding at the time was that certain chemotherapies tended to interfere with skin regeneration, particularly in areas subject to high wearing (hands, feet, elbows), or rapid replacement (particularly mucous membranes, lips and mouth especially).
Not all chemotherapies are brutal, but some can be quite fiendish, and quality of life is a legitimate consideration when considering whether to proceed with treatment. Informed decisionmaking and consent in a context where expertise is rare and clinicians don't directly experience the adverse effects is difficult at best.
It's also meaningful insofar as extended survival time suggests progress against the disease mechanism. This may not mean long-term survival for present sufferers of this particular disease, but may suggest future research which is more promising, or if this route hits a wall on any additional outcomes improvements, limitations to this approach. The advance of knowledge is a benefit, regardless of ultimate patient outcomes.
(Where the trade-off in knowledge gains vs. patient outcomes lies is yet another realm of medical ethics.)
Language-lawyering the term is however specious. If you want to comment on quality of life or other matters, those are separate and meritorious discussions. You're embarking on them in a manner that's not likely to be especially conducive however.
No one actually knows that one way or the other since some patients were still taking it after the study ended according to the article.
One group had median values of 8.5 months for progression-free survival and 13.1 months for overall survival.
The other group had median values of 8.1 months for progression-free survival and 15.6 months for overall survival.
Overall Survival (OS) measures the time until death from any cause.
Progression-Free Survival (PFS) evaluates how long a treatment can delay disease progression or death.
So at least most of the patients from the study have died, because otherwise median values could not have been computed.
Thus the treatment had provided them a median life extension of about 3/4 years. The lucky ones probably have got more than an extra year.
We can’t know ahead of time which medicine works so you need to fund many teams at the beginning.
<https://hardmanandco.com/research/corporate-research/2025-ph...>
Total VC tech investment in 2025 was $425 billion.
<https://news.crunchbase.com/venture/funding-data-third-large...>
The recently-read-out trial is in the 'second line' - meaning patients will have received one 'line' of treatment before this - typically chemotherapy +/- surgery. The chemotherapy regimes used for pancreatic cancer can be pretty brutal, and patients can usually tolerate one, max two lines overall. As such, this trial administering only daraxonrasib monotherapy made sense.
The first line trial of daraxonrasib is already underway, and includes both darax monotherapy and darax + chemo arms. (They are combining with a slightly less brutal chemotherapy called GnP, with an eye to the overall side effect burden considering the non-trial side effects that darax also brings.)
It'll be very interesting to see the outcome of this trial; there are some examples elsewhere in oncology where a treatment is recommended by guidelines without chemotherapy over a combination with chemotherapy, as the small survival benefit the addition of chemotherapy brings is seen as outweighed by the additional toxicity.
So pancreatic cancer is basically a genetic disease for most patients instead of environmental?
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2505783
Paywalled but has a free access option if you make an account.
