When Sivraj Muralikrishnan, a medical oncologist at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Jersey, looked ahead to the 2026 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting, one trial stood out above all others: a study testing a new drug called daraxonrasib against pancreatic cancer. Now that the meeting has wrapped up, his prediction proved right.
The trial, called RASolute 302, was so impressive that Muralikrishnan called it "the single biggest study presentation" at the entire conference. His words carried weight — and so did the data. Pancreatic cancer is one of the hardest cancers to treat. Most patients who get the diagnosis survive less than a year, and there haven't been many good options once the disease spreads beyond the pancreas.
Daraxonrasib works by directly targeting RAS proteins, which drive cancer growth in many patients. In the trial, patients who had already tried one round of treatment and whose cancer had spread took the new drug instead of standard chemotherapy. The results were striking: their overall survival nearly doubled compared to those on chemotherapy, with a hazard ratio of 0.40 — a statistical measure that shows the treatment cut the risk of death by a significant margin. The cancer also stayed under control longer, and the drug's side effects were gentler than chemo.
"It represents a new standard of care and is practice changing for the second-line setting," Muralikrishnan said. The audience agreed — the researchers received a standing ovation when they presented their findings.
The same conference also highlighted other advances in cancer care. A study called LIBRETTO-432 showed that the drug selpercatinib helped patients with a specific genetic mutation (RET fusion) in early-stage lung cancer stay cancer-free longer after surgery. This suggests that targeted treatments are moving into earlier stages of disease, potentially preventing cancer from returning.
For Muralikrishnan, the pancreatic cancer result is the most meaningful because of the patients it could help. "Pancreatic cancer has historically been hard to treat, with a generally poor prognosis, and this study showed that we have promising therapies coming for patients who will have meaningful benefit," he said. The findings could mark a turning point not just for pancreatic cancer, but for targeting RAS-driven cancers more broadly — a goal researchers have pursued for decades.