Experimental drug offers metastatic pancreatic cancer patients months of extra life

Rachelle Gardner sat in an examination room at City of Hope Cancer Center Chicago on a late July afternoon in 2026 and did something that, three years earlier, she had never imagined she would do again: she took a pill with genuine hope attached to it. She shook three light blue tablets from a bottle, swallowed them one at a time with water, and said aloud, "To good health and getting rid of that cancer bug!" The 59-year-old teacher of visually impaired students meant it. The medication she had just taken, called daraxonrasib, represented something oncologists had been chasing for decades in pancreatic cancer treatment: a way to actually extend life beyond the brutal arithmetic of chemotherapy.

Gardner's path to that moment began three years earlier with a rash. She noticed strange marks on her arms and chest, went to an urgent care center, and was sent home with steroids and antihistamines. When the rash persisted and jaundice set in, further testing revealed the real problem: her liver and gallbladder were failing. The diagnosis came as a phone call while she and her fiancé sat at their kitchen table. "We looked at each other and started crying," she recalled. She was stage 1 pancreatic cancer. What followed was months of chemotherapy, then the Whipple procedure—a surgery that removes the head of the pancreas, part of the small intestine, the gallbladder, and the bile duct. For a time, scans showed no disease. Then in spring 2025, it returned as stage 4. More chemotherapy. Radiation. By May 2026, her doctors told her those treatments had stopped working. She was, in her own words, "going home for the cancer to beat me." She refused.

What Gardner and dozens of other patients across Illinois now have access to is daraxonrasib, an experimental drug that does not cure pancreatic cancer but offers something nearly as valuable: more time. In a recent clinical trial, patients with metastatic pancreatic cancer who had already tried other treatments and received daraxonrasib lived for a median of about 13 months after enrollment, compared to a median of about six months for those who received additional chemotherapy instead. That difference—seven extra months on average—represents the most significant advance in pancreatic cancer treatment in decades, according to Dr. Evan Pisick, a medical oncologist at City of Hope Cancer Center Chicago. "This is honestly a game-changer," he said. "It's the first targeted therapy we're able to offer them, the first thing other than just giving chemotherapy."

The drug has not yet received full approval from the US Food and Drug Administration, but the FDA has authorized Revolution Medicines, the drug's manufacturer, to distribute it through an expanded access program to eligible patients who have exhausted other treatment options. Physicians submit individual requests for the medication, which is provided free to patients. At City of Hope Cancer Center Chicago alone, Gardner is one of seven or eight patients who have begun receiving the drug. Other Illinois health systems—Advocate Health Care, OSF HealthCare, Endeavor Health, and University of Chicago Medicine—have also started enrolling patients in recent weeks. Dr. Ardaman Shergill, the lead investigator for the clinical trial at UChicago Medicine, called the drug's ability to extend survival in this population "unprecedented in pancreatic cancer." Beyond the numbers, patients reported improvements in pain, appetite, and energy levels compared to chemotherapy.

Mary Louise McAdams, 84, of Bronzeville in Chicago, was initially told she had about six months to a year to live when diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2024. She underwent chemotherapy and radiation, but the treatments ravaged her body—at one point she was hospitalized due to side effects. When she learned about daraxonrasib through the expanded access program, she enrolled. Two weeks into treatment, she spoke about what she hoped for: more time with her five children and four grandchildren, more years of life as long as she remained functional and able to contribute to her own care. Dr. Pisick noted that the expanded access program serves a critical function for patients who simply do not have time to wait for traditional regulatory pathways. "It gives the patients an advantage to not have to sit around and wait because a lot of them don't have that kind of time," he said.

Gardner's case illustrates why clinical research and expanded access matter in oncology. Robert Stone, chief executive officer of City of Hope, observed that discovery in cancer treatment is accelerating faster than the regulatory system can process it. "At times, clinical trials and expanded access programmes are the best treatment option for patients," he said. "And this is a perfect example." For Gardner, the medication means something concrete: more road trips with her fiancé, more time teaching, more moments with her two grown sons and her little grandnieces and grandnephews, who call her Auntie Gaga. She takes the pills every day now, optimistic about the year ahead. The drug does not promise a cure. But in pancreatic cancer, where metastatic disease has historically meant counting months rather than years, the promise of more time—and better quality time—is its own kind of breakthrough.