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The most hopeful cancer news in years

Why a roomful of oncologists gave a standing ovation for a line graph.

In a darkened convention hall in Chicago on May 31, a Harvard oncologist named Brian Wolpin stood at a podium and in a voice that sounded as if he was reading from the phone book, recited a set of numbers that brought a roomful of cancer doctors to their feet for 42 seconds. Adam Feuerstein, a biotech correspondent for the health news site Stat who has covered cancer conferences like this for two decades, said he had never witnessed anything like it. The applause lasted so long that Wolpin, caught off-guard, ad-libbed: “That time was not built into my talk.”

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What Wolpin had just shown attendees at the American Society of Clinical Oncology’s (ASCO) annual meeting was a simple line graph: a drug called daraxonrasib had nearly doubled median overall survival in a 500-patient trial of a form of previously treated advanced pancreatic cancer. ASCO’s chief medical officer Julie Gralow termed the result not a home run but a “grand slam.” Toronto oncologist Jennifer Knox called it a “game changer.”

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Wolpin received such a rapturous response at ASCO because pancreatic cancer is among the most pernicious and treatment-resistant cancers in existence, killing more than 50,000 Americans a year, among them Supreme Court Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The cancer has a five-year survival rate in the low teens.

Wolpin, who began his career in the mid-2000s at the world-class Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, told The Bulwark: “I think I saw several patients that first year of fellowship who had pancreatic cancer, and they all died in like three months. It’s not supposed to happen here, right? You’re supposed to have figured this out.” For decades after President Richard Nixon declared a “war on cancer,” deaths continued to mount and medical progress on many cancers remained all too limited.

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But a change is well underway. The US death rate from cancer has fallen 34 percent from its 1991 peak through........

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