FWIW it's commonly the case with cancers of abdominal organs: stomach, pancreas, liver, kidney, etc. These cancers are frequently not diagnosed until at an advanced stage. Symptoms tend to be nonspecific, overlap with ubiquitous conditions like constipation, gastritis.
A goal of research is improving early detection of these cancers but it's an uphill battle. It's difficult to increase providers' "index of suspicion" of seemingly "minor" complaints.
That’s a generalization, pancreatic cancer is often extremely lethal, depending on the type and case the survival rate can be as or more grim than glioma. Bowel and urinary cancers including kidney cancer are often very treatable and survivable when discovered due to symptoms. I don’t think it’s helpful to group all abdominal cancers as being uniquely or especially bad or late discovered. Likewise for the particularly aggressive or advanced cancers these types of announcements and trials rarely translate to major changes in prognosis. More typical if there is any positive result it looks like additional weeks or at best months of aggressive treatments rather than significant ”cure” rates.
It can be disappointing to see that even a successful drug, like this one, is "only" extending life expectancy from 6.7 months to 13.2. But this is what the first steps towards a cure look like.
Childhood leukemia used to be overwhelmingly fatal, and early chemotherapy trials also only managed a couple months of remission. Researchers were even criticized for subjecting patients to harsh side effects to no apparent benefit. But thanks to that research, most patients are now cured; per capita death rates from childhood leukemia are down 14x from the 1950s, mostly driven by improved treatment.
Daraxonrasib is an incredible invention on a technical level, and a meaningful step forwards in the treatment of many cancers. We'll need a couple more equally incredible inventions to be able to cure pancreatic cancer.
Moderna is testing an mRNA vaccine that might be useful against bladder and kidney cancers. Hopefully the same technology can be applied to pancreatic and liver cancers. Fingers crossed.
We are able to early detect these cancers right now with routine targeted imaging. Perhaps we should be working to solve or improve on the drawbacks associated with doing this, some of which are:
CT scans emit ionizing radiation.
MRI contrast can buildup and be retained in the body over repeated administrations.
The scans can produce false positives, surface benign abnormalities which result in a wild goose chase, cause severe patient anxiety and healthcare burden, and result in over-treatment.
And of course doing this on a whole population level is not cost or time effective.
> And of course doing this on a whole population level is not cost or time effective.
It will never be cost or time effective if we never try. I'm paying out of pocket every year for an MRI scan, this was my second year this past year.