Every once in a while, an advance in treating cancer is so stunning that doctors get chills. Such is the case for Revolution Medicines’ pancreatic cancer therapy daraxonrasib, which in a late-stage study allowed patients with advanced disease to live twice as long as those who only received chemotherapy.

That’s an astounding advance for a cancer where experimental treatments have tended to offer progress measured in days or weeks, if at all. Giving patients and their families more months of time together — another birthday, another Christmas, a family reunion — would be truly meaningful.

It also lays a foundation for the entire field of researchers and drug developers to build from: What if instead of adding months to someone’s life, future progress allows doctors to realistically talk about years?

Pancreatic cancer, which is among the deadliest common cancers, has been infuriatingly difficult to crack. Novel treatments that looked promising in early studies have failed when tested in larger ones.

The challenge comes from how late the disease is discovered — some 80% of pancreatic cancer patients’ tumors have already spread by the time of diagnosis. That makes their cancer inoperable. Previous experimental treatments have tended to briefly shrink tumors at best.

Daraxonrasib is different, experts tell me. The glimmer of hope it generated in smaller trials has grown into a beacon for the field. In a large, carefully........

© The Korea Times