By Charisse Ede & Cherie Dear
August 23rd, 2026
 

There’s been a significant milestone in the treatment of pancreatic cancer, with Dare to Hope’s inaugural Fellowship recipient Dr Michael Lee treating two of the first patients in an Australian trial of the most promising drug to date.

The patients were recruited into the RASolute 303 trial at the Jreissati Pancreatic Centre at the Epworth, which focusses on a drug that has shown significant promise in pancreatic cancer treatment, doubling survival from an average 6.7 months to almost 14 months in clinical trials.

The drug, daraxonrasib, is an oral pill taken every day. It targets cancer-causing mutations in pancreatic cells, particularly the RAS gene that regulates cell growth.

 “As a researcher myself and a Doctor it’s incredibly exciting for me to be administering these new drugs to two of my patients.  The breakthrough we have seen in the initial trials has given us the hope that has been missing for so long for pancreatic cancer patients”, Michael said.

Patients must have metastasized pancreatic cancer and have not had any treatment to qualify for the trial.

The first recipients, including one from regional Victoria, were relieved and excited to get approval into the trial, after waiting almost eight weeks for it to begin - a long time for a pancreatic cancer patient.

“That’s almost eight weeks without treatment for us to be in this position – any delay in treatment makes a huge difference. So that was very exciting,” Michael said.

Michael says the emergence of this drug is expected to disrupt the current oncological landscape and change the standard of care for metastatic pancreatic cancer.

“This is why research is so important.  To discover new ways of treating patients who deserve a better survival rate than the current 14% at five years. This breakthrough and being able to help my patients access it inspires me to keep working towards a better future for all pancreatic cancer patients”.

Dare to Hope CEO Cherie Dear says this is an incredibly exciting moment for the pancreatic cancer community.

“To see our inaugural Dare to Hope Fellow, Dr Michael Lee, treating the first Australian patients with a drug showing such promise is something we are enormously proud of,” she said.

“Dare to Hope had no role in developing daraxonrasib or bringing this trial to Australia, but this is exactly why we invest in clinician-researchers like Michael - people who are at the intersection of research and patient care and can help translate scientific advances into better outcomes for patients. We're grateful to those who have sustained research investment before us.

“For me personally, it is impossible not to think about my husband Paul and my Dad. This treatment came too late for them, as it has for so many people who have died from this devastating disease.

“But this is the kind of progress we desperately hoped would come for the people diagnosed after them - it gives us a glimpse of what the future of pancreatic cancer treatment could look like.

Cherie says breakthroughs only save lives if patients can access them, and unfortunately there is no single, reliable and up-to-date source for clinical trials in Australia - leaving many people with pancreatic cancer  reaching out to us trying to find information about how to access these life-changing drugs. There are also systemic barriers that mean that some trials don’t even make it to Australia, and if they do, access to them may be very limited.  At the moment the best place to start is with your treating oncologist, ask them about how to access a trial that might benefit you. 

“For the patients who have accessed this trial, this is real hope. But our job at Dare to Hope is to ask what needs to happen so that tomorrow, that hope reaches many more of the 4,800 people diagnosed with pancreatic cancer each year and their families.

“As we have become more deeply involved in funding pancreatic cancer research, we have increasingly seen that investment in science must be matched by investment in the systems that allow patients to benefit from it. That is the next challenge we need governments, researchers, clinicians, industry and the pancreatic cancer community to solve together.”

For more information about trials in Australia you can search on any of these  databases - however there is limited information available about Daraxonrasib. Dare to Hope supports the development of one up to date, easy to navigate, single trial site for people with pancreatic cancer. 

https://www.australianclinicaltrials.gov.au/
https://www.anzctr.org.au/
https://trials.cancervic.org.au/
https://clinicaltrials.gov/