What happened
KRAS is the faulty switch driving more than 90 percent of pancreatic tumors, and for decades its surface was too smooth and featureless for any drug to grab. In a Phase 3 trial presented this week and published in the New England Journal of Medicine, the oral drug daraxonrasib from Revolution Medicines extended median survival in metastatic pancreatic cancer from 6.7 months to 13.2 months, and cut the risk of death by about 60 percent across roughly 500 previously treated patients. It works by latching onto a helper protein, cyclophilin A, to finally get a grip on KRAS.
Why this matters: pancreatic cancer is the textbook definition of "few options." Turning a once-undruggable target into a once-daily pill that nearly doubles survival is not an incremental tweak, it is a different category of result, and the company is now seeking FDA approval.
Trial results are not the same as a drug in your pharmacy, and 13 months is progress, not a cure. But "undruggable" just became "druggable" for the mutation behind a third of all cancer deaths. For the oncology and drug-development folks here, what does cracking KRAS open up next?
Source
Reported by A once-undruggable KRAS target falls: daraxonrasib nearly doubles pancreatic cancer survival via sciencedaily.com, published June 4, 2026.