For those with late stage pancreatic cancer, half live less than a year and half live longer than a year, according to the front page WSJ article quoted below. But the article seems to be celebrating a patient who has survived 17 months on a new drug. The patient has a feeling, perhaps because of a lesion that they radiated, that the drug may stop working soon.
So let’s say that without the drug she might have expected roughly a year of life, and now with the drug she has gotten roughly 17 months of life. Sure 17 months is better than 12 months.
But are our expectations so low and our cancer progress so slow, that an extra five months of life is front-page news?
(p. A1) Pranathi Perati was running out of time to treat her stage-four pancreatic cancer when she found out she would get another shot: a clinical trial testing a new experimental drug.
Perati’s odds were slim—3% of late-stage pancreatic-cancer patients are still alive after five years. And half of all pancreatic-cancer patients live for less than a year after their diagnosis. For Perati, the drug, daraxonrasib from Revolution Medicines, has helped keep her alive for 17 months and counting.
. . .
(p. A4) The pill has given her some fatigue and mouth ulcers, but she feels better than she did with chemo. A lesion in her lung started progressing this past winter and was radiated, but her disease has been stable otherwise.
“Seventeen months is a lot of good time to buy,” she said. Still, Perati worries that her time on the drug might soon run out. She has started looking for more options. Her son is set to graduate high school this summer.
For the full story see:
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date February 28, 2025, and has the title “New Treatments Give Hope to Patients With One of the Deadliest Cancers.”)