PORTLAND, Maine (WGME) — It’s potentially new hope for pancreatic cancer patients.<\/p>\n
The FDA has just given approval to a new drug to fight what has traditionally been one of the deadliest cancers.<\/p>\n
The drug is called Rasonque, and it’s a pill designed to fight cancer in a novel way.<\/p>\n
It attacks a mutated protein called KRAS that pancreatic, lung, and colon cancers feed on. They die without it.<\/p>\n
In trials, the new drug has extended survival to more than 13 months, as opposed to only seven months for chemotherapy.<\/p>\n
One patient here in Maine with stage four pancreatic cancer, Eugene Slobodzian, says it’s made a difference in his fight against the disease.<\/p>\n
“It’s giving me time… time that I wouldn’t otherwise have, and it’s a lot easier to take pills than it is to do chemo,” Slobodzian said. <\/p>\n
While no price has been announced, analysts are forecasting the drugmaker Revolution Medicines will charge several hundred thousand dollars per year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"PORTLAND, Maine (WGME) — It’s potentially new hope for pancreatic cancer patients. The FDA has just given approval…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":581402,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[134,524,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-581401","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-medication","tag-health","tag-medication","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/581401","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=581401"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/581401\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/581402"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=581401"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=581401"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=581401"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}