A Grim Diagnosis, but New Science Is Rewriting the Story of Pancreatic Cancer

Former Sen. Ben Sasse (R–Neb.), who previously served as president of the University of Florida, revealed in late December that he had been diagnosed with Stage 4 pancreatic cancer. "Advanced pancreatic is nasty stuff; it's a death sentence," he observed. He's right. Patients diagnosed at that late stage currently have a five-year survival rate of about 3 percent and often less than a year to live.

Researchers, however, have recently reported some good news about advanced treatments that significantly increase the life expectancy of patients and, in some cases, even appear to cure the illness.

In fact, Sasse is enrolled in a clinical trial for one of the medications. He is taking the anti-cancer drug daraxonrasib, developed by Revolution Medicines. The drug aims at a previously hard-to-target RAS mutation that drives tumor growth and survival in around 90 percent of pancreatic cancer cases. The company reported earlier this month that patients taking their new anti-cancer drug basically doubled their overall survival time from 6.7 to 13.2 months. The company now plans to seek Food and Drug Administration approval for the treatment.

Last week, researchers associated with the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York reported their success with a new therapeutic mRNA anti-cancer vaccine. mRNA vaccines work by delivering messenger RNA to cells, instructing them to produce tumor proteins that trigger the immune system to kill cancer cells. The researchers worked with mRNA vaccine company BioNTech, along with Genentech, to develop the vaccine that targets a version of the RAS cancer-causing mutation. (BioNTech previously worked with Pfizer to develop a highly effective mRNA COVID-19 vaccine.)

The researchers surgically removed pancreatic cancer tumors from 16 early-stage patients. Patients diagnosed with Stage 1 and Stage 2 average five-year survival rates of about 43.6 percent and 16.7 percent, respectively.

The tumors were sent to BioNTech, which used them to develop personalized mRNA vaccines targeting the specific cancer-causing mutations in each patient. In eight of the 16 patients, the vaccine activated cancer-killing immune cells. Of those eight, seven patients were alive four to six years following the surgery. Patients who have had pancreatic cancer surgery live, on average, about two and a half years after diagnosis. In the Memorial Sloan Kettering clinical trial, only two of the eight patients whose immune systems didn't respond to the vaccine are still alive. The researchers are launching a larger Phase 2 clinical trial to further test their vaccine.

Preliminary research last October reported that being vaccinated with mRNA COVID-19 vaccines actually primes the immune system to respond more fully to anti-cancer immunotherapies. Receipt of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines within 100 days of initiating cancer immunotherapy treatments significantly improved the median and three-year overall survival of cancer patients in various trials.

These heartening results stand in stark contrast to the bogus claims that mRNA vaccines are causing an epidemic of "turbo cancers."

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