When doctors told Vicky Stinson in 2024 that she had Stage III pancreatic cancer and warned she had “months — not years” to live, the retired National Park Service landscape architect refused to accept that timeline. Two years later, the 65-year-old from Flagstaff, Ariz., is still here and still active — painting watercolors, hiking with her husband and staying engaged with researchers searching for better treatments.
Her survival so far reflects rapid advances in a disease long known for being hard to detect and difficult to treat. About 70,000 Americans are diagnosed with pancreatic cancer each year and roughly 80% of those cases are found at a late stage. The five‑year survival rate remains low — about 13% — even as overall cancer survival has climbed thanks to immunotherapies, genetics and improved imaging.
What makes pancreatic cancer so dangerous is partly anatomy and biology. The pancreas sits deep in the abdomen behind other organs, so tumors are hard to spot on exams and scans. Early symptoms tend to be vague — abdominal pain, new digestive problems or new‑onset diabetes — and the cancers develop a dense, protective microenvironment, or “cocoon,” that limits delivery of chemotherapy. The organ’s proximity to major blood vessels also gives tumor cells easy routes to spread. “Pancreas cancer is more like a handful of sand that gets spilled than it is a tennis ball,” says clinician leaders involved in pancreatic cancer care, explaining why tiny deposits of tumor are easily missed.
Stinson’s most meaningful benefit came from a new targeted drug trial. She spent 13 months taking daraxonrasib, an oral RAS inhibitor designed to attack cancer cells with a common mutation. Clinical trial data published recently showed daraxonrasib could hold disease at bay for a median of about 8–9 months without progression — roughly three to four times longer than typical chemotherapy, which often controls disease for only 2–3 months. The drug is taken as a single pill and tends to cause different, often milder side effects than traditional chemotherapy. Stinson experienced only mild acne-like rashes and enough energy to hike in the Dolomites and celebrate her wedding anniversary with a seven-mile trail walk in Colorado.
The improvement has been significant enough that the FDA allowed the drug’s maker to expand access to patients before formal approval, and researchers say RAS inhibition could become a backbone for future combination treatments aimed more precisely at the genetic drivers of pancreatic tumors.
But daraxonrasib wasn’t a cure for Stinson. After more than a year of stability, her cancer recurred in March with a new growth that spread to her ovaries and was staged as metastatic. She stopped the trial pill and returned to chemotherapy. “My husband’s been really sad about it, too, just because it was so easy,” she says of the oral drug. Still, she remains involved with researchers and hopes a bespoke therapy based on her tumor’s genetics can be developed.
Scientists are attacking pancreatic cancer from multiple directions. One promising avenue is individualized mRNA vaccines. In a small trial in Germany, researchers designed mRNA vaccines tailored to each patient’s tumor mutations and administered them within weeks; about half the participants mounted measurable immune responses, and several experienced prolonged benefit. Larger trials are now underway to confirm and expand those findings.
Another recent development is a device that delivers tumor‑treating fields: high‑frequency alternating electrical signals sent through electrodes applied to the abdomen. The FDA recently approved the technology for pancreatic cancer after trials suggested modest survival gains and pain reduction without adding systemic toxicities. Some clinicians hope the device will add a few extra months of life and better quality time with family for patients who use it.
Researchers are also exploring ways to alter the tumor microenvironment to make cancers less protective and more vulnerable to immune attack, and to combine targeted inhibitors, vaccines, immunotherapies and novel devices into multi‑modal regimens.
For patients diagnosed today, the array of experimental options can be both hopeful and stressful — hope that something effective is coming soon, stress about timing and who will benefit. Stinson describes it as hanging on and waiting: “It feels like it’s so close and I kind of feel like a ripe tomato on a vine — if I can just keep holding on a little bit longer, this just might work for me.”
Her story illustrates how new, more precise therapies can change life and expectations for people with pancreatic cancer, even if they are not yet cures. For now, advances such as RAS inhibitors, individualized vaccines and electrical‑field therapies are widening the toolbox and giving patients like Stinson additional time, energy and reasons to keep fighting.