Free Republic

A new drug for pancreatic cancer is showing promise in early testing. Daraxonrasib is a daily pill designed to block cancer signals linked to the RAS gene. It has now finished an early-stage clinical trial — the first time it was tested in people — to evaluate both its safety and effectiveness. The clinical trial, led by the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and published in The New England Journal of Medicine, tested the drug in 168 patients with advanced pancreatic cancer whose tumors had mutations in the RAS gene. All study participants had previously received at least one chemotherapy treatment.

By the time doctors detect pancreatic cancer, it’s often too late to treat effectively. But a new study suggests that artificial intelligence might be able to find signs of the disease before tumors are visible on a scan. An AI model developed at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, detected abnormalities on patients’ CT scans up to three years before they were diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, according to research published this week in the journal Gut. The scientists behind the model, which is now being evaluated in a clinical trial, trained it by feeding it CT scans from patients who...

Pancreatic cancer is on course to be the second-leading cause of cancer-related death in the US by 2030, in part because 85 percent of cases aren't diagnosed until the disease has spread. We're just not catching it early enough. Thanks to a newly developed AI model from researchers at the Mayo Clinic and University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, that might be about to change. Their new system, called REDMOD (radiomics-based early detection model), was tested on CT scans from people later diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. In nearly 3 out of 4 cases, REDMOD successfully spotted the most common...

We live in an age of wonders made possible by a combination of free markets and scientific advancement. This weekend a large group of oncologists, doctors who specialize in the treatment of cancer, met to show off their latest breakthroughs at a conference called ASCO26. The news from this conference is so good that it brought standing ovations from the assembled doctors. The big breakthrough that everyone is excited about involves pancreatic cancer which has long been a death sentence for many people. For instance, cartoonist Scott Adams died from metastatic prostrate cancer earlier this year. But a new drug...