How an ‘Impossible’ Idea Led to a Pancreatic Cancer Breakthrough
The new strategy also holds promise for lung and colon tumors. Here’s how scientists discovered it.
Pancreatic cancer is one of the most dire diagnoses in medicine. There are few available treatments, and they do little to help. For decades, experimental drugs flopped in trials. Many researchers believed the biological obstacles could not be surmounted.
In what seems the blink of an eye, all that has changed. A drug nearing regulatory approval, daraxonrasib, is the first to substantially extend the lives of patients with pancreatic cancer. It works by targeting a cellular protein that fuels not just nearly all pancreatic tumors, but also many lung and colon cancers. Those three are the leading causes of cancer deaths.
Now, some scientists predict that the approach could wind up being the most significant advance in cancer treatment in 15 years, since the arrival of immunotherapy.
The long scientific journey that led to the drug is a triumph of both public and private research funding, succeeding only after decades of false starts and dashed hopes — and the unraveling of conventional wisdom that turned out to be completely wrong.
News from National Institute of Health...
Maybe it was already there when he was at Disney World. Sitting in his office on a late-winter morning, wearing jeans and a hooded sweatshirt adorned on the front with a teddy bear in a business suit, Ryan O’Grady, Ph.D., said he couldn’t rule out the possibility.
“I don’t know. You can’t really say if it was, but I think about it,” said Dr. O’Grady, a mathematics professor at a small liberal arts college in Pittsburgh’s northern suburbs.
It was February 2023, on that family trip with his wife and two young daughters, when Dr. O’Grady first experienced some uncomfortable gastrointestinal issues. A generally healthy 43-year-old at the time, he saw no reason to worry.
But as the year went on, the problems started occurring more regularly. Finally, with the holiday season approaching, his gastrointestinal difficulties became more frequent and more severe. With some spirited encouragement from his wife, Dr. O’Grady went to the emergency room. That led to a doctor’s appointment and, thanks to an opportune cancellation, a quickly scheduled colonoscopy.
Finally, two days after Christmas 2024, the call came from his doctor: colorectal cancer
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