{"slug": "pancreatic-cancer-breakthrough-has-big-implications-for-early-detection-effort", "title": "Pancreatic cancer breakthrough has big implications for early detection effort", "summary": "A new pancreatic cancer drug, Daraxonrasib, has doubled median survival rates for patients with advanced metastatic disease, earning a standing ovation at a major oncology conference. The breakthrough, combined with the world's largest early detection program run by Moores Cancer Center, offers hope for earlier intervention and improved outcomes.", "body_md": "**Getting your**\n\n[Trinity Audio](//trinityaudio.ai)player ready...Raj Aji has been visiting San Diego regularly since last summer, and not for the weather. The retired Bay Area attorney flies south to keep appointments at Moores Cancer Center in La Jolla, getting the blood tests, medical imaging and other care required to remain in a clinical trial of [Daraxonrasib](https://www.mercurynews.com/2026/05/31/experimental-pill-promises-new-hope-for-deadly-pancreatic-cancer/), the pancreatic cancer drug so effective that its inventors received a [standing ovation](https://www.instagram.com/reel/DZDsY1CFFZL/?hl=en) at the world’s largest oncology conference in Chicago last month.\n\nThe applause came for the medication’s ability to block the spread of the deadly disease, long considered untreatable with drugs.\n\n**RELATED: Stanford’s first proton therapy patient is 7. His case shows why the treatment matters**\n\nNow, patients are traveling to receive what once seemed impossible.\n\nAji, first diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2024 after feeling some unexpected pain in his abdomen, is among a growing group of patients who have experienced the power of this new medication. Recently published trial [results](https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2605555) document a doubling of median survival rates for those with advanced metastatic disease when compared with chemotherapy alone.\n\nWhen his cancer returned in 2025, having spread to his liver, after initial surgery in 2024, Aji said that his oncologist at UC San Francisco Health was well aware of the promise of this new drug. While his personal chemotherapy history prevented him from enrolling in a trial near his home, a different trial type that he did qualify for was available at nearly two dozen cancer centers across the nation. Enrollment initially meant traveling to Utah, but not long after, Moores Cancer Center added the trial, and he transferred his care to San Diego.\n\nWhile nobody feels lucky after receiving a pancreatic cancer diagnosis, this new drug is making patients with stage 4 diagnoses feel fortunate.\n\n“I’m lucky that I had it when this drug has been available,” Aji said. “I can’t help but think back to the number of people before me who didn’t have this opportunity.”\n\nAnd this moment, notes Dr. Diane Simeone, director of Moores Cancer Center, is just the beginning. After all, clinical trials focus on the sickest patients first. But there could potentially be a much greater win available if Daraxonrasib, and similar “RAS” inhibitors now in drug development pipelines, were given to pancreatic patients early on in the course of disease before cancer cells spread from the pancreas to other parts of the body.\n\nSimeone is in a particularly prime position to understand how a push toward early detection will dovetail with this new breakthrough in medication.\n\nSince she arrived from the East Coast in 2024, Simeone has run the world’s largest pancreatic cancer early detection program from San Diego, serving as committee chair and a principal investigator of the [Pancreatic Cancer Early Detection Consortium.](https://precedestudy.org/) Often called PRECEDE, the program is a worldwide network of 65 cancer centers that has been working since 2020 to enroll 20,000 people at risk of developing pancreatic cancer. To date, Simeone said, about 12,000 have already signed up, participating in regular blood and imaging tests.\n\n“All of these centers are working in harmony, collecting data the same way, and now we’re detecting cancer about every week through screening,” Simeone said.\n\nIt’s what study designers hoped would happen. Spotting cancer in this cohort, one with lots of diagnostic testing already on file, delivers the priceless opportunity to learn what signs and signals appear first when pancreatic cancer develops in the body. Better understanding early symptoms, such as the presence of certain molecules called biomarkers, is particularly important with pancreatic cancer, as it often progresses relatively silently until it has spread throughout the body, leading to a very low survival rate after detection.\n\nAlready, studying the test results of PRECEDE participants who have developed pancreatic cancer while enrolled in the study has suggested better tests to detect the disease earlier, allowing intervention before it spreads. Today, Simeone said, about 75% of cases in the PRECEDE cohort are found in the first stage of disease development. And, there are reasons to think that new tools, especially those that use artificial intelligence programs to help analyze medical imaging, can drive the early detection rate even higher.\n\nThe astounding results delivered by Daraxonrasib, and likely by a new crop of medications now in development pipelines of pharma companies that work in a similar fashion, suddenly provide a significant opportunity to act.\n\n“There is a beehive of activity around this,” Simeone said. “We’re now starting to have conversations about what kinds of interception studies are possible.”\n\nIt is not difficult to imagine using RAS inhibitors very early on to prevent spread even if it is likely that tumor-removal surgery, called resection, should provide a cure.\n\n“If you find, say, a one-centimeter pancreas cancer, we resect it, and you may want to do a belt-and-suspenders approach, treating for, let’s say, three months with a RAS inhibitor,” Simeone said.\n\nOf course, such interception studies would work only with those already enrolled in PRECEDE. Many are still diagnosed only after significant disease progression. For these patients, access to Daraxonrasib is an urgent priority. Here, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has already taken action, [approving](https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-permits-expanded-access-investigational-pancreatic-cancer-drug) the drug made by Revolution Medicines of Redwood City for expanded access. Patients with previously treated pancreatic cancer of the type that the drug combats can request doses through their oncologists if they do not qualify for any of the clinical trials now underway.\n\nThose like Aji, the Moores patient commuting from the Bay Area to participate in a Daraxonrasib trial, are not promised forever. As with any drug, results will vary; while median survival for pancreatic cancer that has spread doubles, individual results may deliver longer or shorter duration.\n\nFor his part, Aji, 64, who has now been taking Daraxonrasib for more than a year, says he is thankful for the time that has already been provided, and especially for the ability to hold the cancer in check without the nasty side effects of chemotherapy, which he stopped taking.\n\nWhile the median survival benefit may move from six months to 13 months, he said he has met pancreatic cancer patients who have now survived for 26 months, double the median result.\n\n“I know that the data also shows that, at some point, people start developing resistance, but it does provide options for patients like me,” he said. “There are other treatments coming, and it opens the door, potentially, to those other treatments in the future.”\n\nThe true benefit, he added, has been a sharpening of life’s priorities.\n\n“You get rid of the stuff that is just adding fluff to your life,” Aji said. “You do things which are really important to you, and it changes your attitude about, you know, what really is going to matter and what isn’t.”", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/pancreatic-cancer-breakthrough-has-big-implications-for-early-detection-effort", "canonical_source": "https://www.mercurynews.com/2026/07/07/pancreatic-cancer-breakthrough-has-big-implications-for-early-detection-effort/", "published_at": "2026-07-07 13:02:07+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-07-07 13:31:18.144731+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-research", "ai-products", "ai-tools"], "entities": ["Daraxonrasib", "Moores Cancer Center", "Raj Aji", "Dr. Diane Simeone", "UC San Francisco Health", "Pancreatic Cancer Early Detection Consortium", "PRECEDE"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/pancreatic-cancer-breakthrough-has-big-implications-for-early-detection-effort", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/pancreatic-cancer-breakthrough-has-big-implications-for-early-detection-effort.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/pancreatic-cancer-breakthrough-has-big-implications-for-early-detection-effort.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/pancreatic-cancer-breakthrough-has-big-implications-for-early-detection-effort.jsonld"}}