In a darkened convention hall in Chicago on May 31, a Harvard oncologist named Brian Wolpin stood at a podium and in a voice that sounded as if he was reading from the phone book, recited a set of numbers that brought a roomful of cancer doctors to their feet for 42 seconds. Adam Feuerstein, a biotech correspondent for the health news site Stat who has covered cancer conferences like this for two decades, said he had never witnessed anything like it. The applause lasted so long that Wolpin, caught off-guard, ad-libbed: “That time was not built into my talk.”
The most hopeful cancer news in years
Why a roomful of oncologists gave a standing ovation for a line graph.
Bryan Walsh is a senior editorial director at Vox overseeing the Future Perfect and climate teams and writes the Good News newsletter. He worked at Time magazine for 15 years as a foreign correspondent in Asia, a climate writer, and an international editor, and he wrote a book on existential risk.
What Wolpin had just shown attendees at the American Society of Clinical Oncology’s (ASCO) annual meeting was a simple line graph: a drug called daraxonrasib had nearly doubled median overall survival in a 500-patient trial of a form of previously treated advanced pancreatic cancer. ASCO’s chief medical officer Julie Gralow termed the result not a home run but a “grand slam.” Toronto oncologist Jennifer Knox called it a “game changer.”
Wolpin received such a rapturous response at ASCO because pancreatic cancer is among the most pernicious and treatment-resistant cancers in existence, killing
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