20/10/2026
A Spanish research team says it has eliminated the deadliest form of pancreatic cancer in mice, raising hopes for a future human treatment.
The work was led by Mariano Barbacid, who heads the Experimental Oncology Group at Spain’s National Cancer Research Centre, or CNIO, in Madrid. His team developed a triple-drug therapy targeting the KRAS pathway, which drives more than 90% of pancreatic cancer cases.
The therapy combined the established drug afatinib with daraxonrasib, an experimental RAS inhibitor, and a protein-degrading compound called SD36. In three separate mouse models, the combination produced the complete and lasting disappearance of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma, the most common and most lethal form of the disease, without major side effects.
Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma has one of the worst survival rates of any major cancer, in part because tumors quickly reroute around single-drug treatments. Barbacid’s team designed the three-pronged approach specifically to block that resistance by attacking the cancer’s survival mechanisms simultaneously.
The findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Barbacid was careful to temper expectations. He said it is important to understand that, although the experimental results have never been obtained before, researchers are not yet in a position to carry out clinical trials with the triple therapy.
The Embassy of Spain in the United Kingdom publicized the study, describing it as an achievement that could make a difference in the fight against the disease.
Human trials have not yet begun, and researchers caution that results in mice do not guarantee the same outcome in people. But the study marks one of the first times scientists have reported a complete, durable elimination of this cancer type in any living model.
