In 2024, after six months of tests to find the cause of jaundice, Vicky Stinson heard the words that terrify most people: pancreatic cancer. By then her disease was Stage III, and a doctor told her she had “months — not years — to live.” Stinson, 65, a retired National Park Service landscape architect who loves watercolor and hiking, decided not to accept that prognosis.
Two years later she is still here and still fighting. “I have this drive and I want to keep going,” she says. Stinson credits part of her extra time to a clinical trial of a new pill, daraxonrasib, and to the expanding set of experimental options that researchers are developing for a disease long notorious for being hard to detect and treat.
Pancreatic cancer presents special problems. The pancreas sits deep in the abdomen behind other organs, so early tumors are hard to feel or spot on routine exams. Symptoms tend to be vague — abdominal pain, trouble eating, new-onset diabetes — and tumors often develop dense, protective tissue that keeps chemotherapy and immune cells out. The gland’s proximity to major veins and arteries gives cancer easy access to the body’s circulatory “highways,” letting cells spread widely. Oncologists describe pancreatic tumors as more like a handful of spilled sand than a single solid mass, meaning tiny deposits are easy to miss.
Those biological challenges help explain the grim statistics: roughly 70,000 Americans are diagnosed with pancreatic cancer each year, about 80% of them at a late stage, and the five-year survival rate remains low, around 13%. By contrast, advances in immunotherapy, genetics and imaging have pushed the overall five-year cancer survival rate far higher in recent years.
That makes the recent wave of experimental therapies so significant. Daraxonrasib, a member of a new class of drugs called RAS inhibitors that target cancers driven by specific mutations, produced encouraging results in clinical trials. Published data showed patients on the drug experienced three to four times longer periods without disease progression — roughly eight to nine months on average — compared with the two to three months typically achieved with standard chemotherapy.
For patients, daraxonrasib’s practical benefits can be as important as its clinical ones. Stinson says the trial drug was a single pill with fewer and more manageable side effects than many chemotherapies. She spent 13 months on the study without tumor growth, describing the year as “a full year of normalcy” that allowed her to hike in the Dolomites and keep up with exercise classes. Reported side effects in the study included rash and diarrhea in about a third of participants; none discontinued the trial for those reasons. Some high-profile patients have shown more severe skin effects, underscoring that toxicities can vary.
Because the results were promising, regulators allowed the drug’s maker to expand access to more patients before full approval — a move that could let others try the medicine within weeks or months while further testing continues. Researchers say RAS inhibition may become the backbone of future pancreatic cancer regimens, especially when combined with other targeted agents or immune-based therapies.
Other experimental approaches are also generating excitement. Small personalized mRNA vaccine trials have shown the ability to stimulate potent, durable immune responses by designing vaccines from the genetic profile of an individual’s tumor. In one early study of 16 patients, an immune response was detected in about half of participants and many experienced substantially longer survival — in some cases measured in years. Those vaccines are now being tested in broader trials.
Separately, a device that delivers alternating electrical fields to the abdomen — so-called tumor-treating fields — has earned regulatory approval. Electrodes placed on the skin send high-frequency signals that disrupt replicating cancer cells and may help stimulate an immune response without adding systemic toxins. Early clinical use at some centers aims to reduce symptoms and extend life by months, offering additional time for patients and families.
For patients living with pancreatic cancer right now, the pace of discovery brings both hope and anxiety. Breakthroughs may arrive fast, but not fast enough for everyone. Stinson’s own cancer returned in late March with new growth in her ovaries, forcing her off the trial drug and onto chemotherapy. The change was painful for her and for her husband because the oral trial drug had been so easy to tolerate.
Still, Stinson remains engaged with researchers, hopeful that treatments tailored to the genetics of her tumor might be developed. “It feels like it’s so close,” she says. “I kind of feel like a ripe tomato on a vine — if I can just keep holding on a little bit longer, this just might work for me.”
Researchers emphasize that combining new targeted drugs, vaccines, devices and improved ways to detect disease earlier offers the best path forward. For patients like Stinson, those combined advances could turn months into years and, eventually, make pancreatic cancer a far less deadly disease.