A daily pill doubles the survival time of people with pancreatic cancer, one of the most aggressive and difficult-to-treat forms of the condition, even after they have stopped responding to chemotherapy. What’s more, the convenient pill has fewer side effects than standard chemotherapy.

“It’s a transformative treatment,” says at University College London, who wasn’t involved in the research. “For decades, [survival outcomes] haven’t changed for pancreatic cancer. [The new treatment] gives you double the amount of time to enjoy your life, be with your family and do things that you would like to do.”

About 70 per cent of people with pancreatic cancer . A combination of no routine screening and vague symptoms, like a sore back, means that the condition is usually spotted when it has spread elsewhere. Standard treatment involves chemotherapy, but even then, most people only survive for about , on average. “The disease is really aggressive and difficult to treat,” says Acedo.

More than 90 per cent of pancreatic cancers are driven by mutations in the KRAS gene, which encodes for a protein known as K-Ras. When the gene is mutated, K-Ras gets stuck in a state that drives cancer cells to divide uncontrollably.

at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York and her colleagues wondered if a drug called daraxonrasib, which binds to the protein, could dampen its signals and slow the growth of cancer cells.

So the team recruited 500 people with metastatic pancreatic cancer from the US, Europe and Asia, all of whom had stopped responding to an initial round of chemotherapy. They were assigned to two groups: the first took daraxonrasib every day and the second continued to receive standard chemotherapy infusions.

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The researchers – who presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting in Chicago on 31 May – found that the participants in the daraxonrasib group went on to survive for 13.2 months, on average, compared with 6.7 months in the chemotherapy group. “It’s fantastic news,” says Acedo. The treatment is the first in decades to improve survival outcomes among patients with advanced pancreatic cancer, she says.

What’s more, only 1 per cent of the participants in the daraxonrasib group stopped taking the drug due to side effects, such as rash, whereas 11 per cent stopped chemotherapy due to adverse events like fatigue. “A daily pill is also much easier to take than chemotherapy, which involves frequent hospital visits and is invasive,” says Acedo.

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The team has submitted the findings to the US Food and Drug Administration, and hopes to get the drug approved for use in people with metastatic pancreatic cancer who have had chemotherapy in the coming months, says O’Reilly.

But it is still far from a cure, says Acedo. “It’s a few extra months, which is really promising, but it’s still not years and they’re still dying of the disease,” says Acedo. Nevertheless, further studies may reveal that combining daraxonrasib with other experimental drugs or chemotherapy could lead to even better outcomes, she says.

The researchers are exploring this in ongoing trials, says O’Reilly. They are also looking at whether daraxonrasib could be used as a first-line therapy in untreated patients, she says.

The long list of side effects associated with statins is vastly overstated, according to the most rigorous assessment of the evidence to date. This is prompting calls for the drugs’ packaging to be updated, over concerns that warnings regarding these reported side effects are putting people off the life-saving medicines.

“We can now be confident that statins do not cause the vast majority of medical issues listed as potential side effects in statin patient information leaflets,” said at the University of Oxford at a press briefing on 3 February.

Statins, which lower cholesterol levels, are inexpensive drugs that significantly cut the risk of heart attacks and strokes. But there has long been concern surrounding their recorded side effects, namely muscle pain, despite a in 2022 showing that this isn’t commonly caused by statins.

“Unfortunately, ongoing confusion and concern – not just in patients, but also many doctors regarding potential statin side effects – mean that many people are not willing to start statins, or stop [taking] them,” said Reith.

Now, Reith and her colleagues have looked into the side effects that are commonly listed on statin labels, such as dizziness, fatigue, memory loss and headache, which normally end up there following evidence from case reports and observational studies. They didn’t investigate muscle pain or weakness, or whether there is an increased risk of diabetes, which was flagged as a small risk in a .

The researchers analysed 19 randomised controlled trials, involving 120,000 participants who were followed for 4.5 years, on average, looking into the effects of five of the most commonly prescribed statins relative to a placebo.

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Of the 66 side effects they analysed, they found that statins don’t seem to be the cause for 62 of them, with similar rates of incidence occurring in the placebo groups. They may arise due to the nocebo effect, where the expectation of harm leads to someone experiencing it, says at New York University Langone Health.

The researchers did find that statins legitimately raise the risk of a few side effects, such as excess protein levels in urine, limb swelling and changes in liver function, but not to the extent that they seem to cause harm. “This allows us to be confident in saying that the benefits of statins really do significantly outweigh their risks,” said Reith.

Drug regulators should now update statin labels, says at the University of California, Los Angeles. For instance, labels could make clear which side effects are actually caused by statins and which seem to occur at similar rates among people on a placebo, she says.

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But this is rarely a quick process – the UK’s Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency only recommended that statin labels update descriptions of muscle weakness and pain as a side effect in January 2026, for instance.

In the meantime, clinicians can use the results to reassure people who are taking statins, or who could benefit from them. “It’s not about telling people that they’re crazy, that they’re wrong or you don’t have a side effect, it’s about educating them to change their expectations and help them,” says Berger.

Watson hopes the review will settle the debate around statin side effects. “The focus of future work should shift away from asking whether statins generally cause these symptoms – we already have this answer,” she says. Instead, it should focus on uncovering who might actually be susceptible to certain statin-related side effects – such as people with several health problems – and why, in real-world settings, she says.