01/02/2026
This is so exciting and hopeful
It’s years from human trial but we’ve had quite a few patients and one relative who had this and it’s awful disease.
Scientists cure pancreatic tumors in mice.
Pancreatic cancer is among the most lethal forms of cancer. It’s aggressive, highly resistant to treatment, and often diagnosed late — leaving patients with few options and limited time. But a new triple-drug therapy might be the most promising advance yet.
A team of scientists, led by Mariano Barbacid, tested a combination of three drugs — daraxonrasib, afatinib, and SD36 — on mice with the most aggressive type of pancreatic cancer. The results were striking: the therapy eliminated all detectable tumors. Even more remarkable, none of the mice experienced relapse during the observation period.
This is rare. Pancreatic cancer is notorious for its ability to adapt and “rewire” its biology in response to treatment. That’s why the triple-drug approach is so important. Each drug targets a different survival mechanism, attacking the cancer from multiple angles before it can adapt.
One of the drugs, SD36, plays a key role in preventing resistance. Combined with inhibitors that block growth signals and KRAS mutations — a hallmark of pancreatic cancer — the therapy shuts down the tumor’s fallback systems.
So far, the results apply only to mice. Human biology is more complex, and trials will be needed to test both safety and efficacy in people. But for one of the hardest-to-treat cancers, this marks a potentially important shift in the research.
If it holds up in humans, the same strategy could be adapted to other treatment-resistant cancers, expanding the toolkit against a disease that still claims millions of lives each year.
