Expert analyzes potential new breakthrough in pancreatic cancer
Revolution Medicines this week announced a stunning survival benefit for its investigational drug in a phase 3 study in pancreatic cancer.
Patients with advanced pancreatic adenocarcinoma who were treated with the company’s daily pill called daraxonrasib lived a median of 13.2 months, compared with 6.7 months for patients who received standard chemotherapy.
Revolution said it plans to use the data to seek approval from the Food and Drug Administration, although it did not say when. When he submits the data, approval can be quick.
STAT spoke with Paul Oberstein of NYU Langone’s Perlmutter Cancer Center, an investigator on the trial, on his biotech podcast “The Readout Loud.”
This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Let’s start by talking about pancreatic cancer in general. Why is it so difficult to treat and what are the current survival rates?
This article is reserved for STAT+ subscribers
Unlock this article – plus daily coverage and analysis of the biotech sector – by subscribing to STAT+.
Already have an account? Log in
See all packages
PakarPBN
A Private Blog Network (PBN) is a collection of websites that are controlled by a single individual or organization and used primarily to build backlinks to a “money site” in order to influence its ranking in search engines such as Google. The core idea behind a PBN is based on the importance of backlinks in Google’s ranking algorithm. Since Google views backlinks as signals of authority and trust, some website owners attempt to artificially create these signals through a controlled network of sites.
In a typical PBN setup, the owner acquires expired or aged domains that already have existing authority, backlinks, and history. These domains are rebuilt with new content and hosted separately, often using different IP addresses, hosting providers, themes, and ownership details to make them appear unrelated. Within the content published on these sites, links are strategically placed that point to the main website the owner wants to rank higher. By doing this, the owner attempts to pass link equity (also known as “link juice”) from the PBN sites to the target website.
The purpose of a PBN is to give the impression that the target website is naturally earning links from multiple independent sources. If done effectively, this can temporarily improve keyword rankings, increase organic visibility, and drive more traffic from search results.