ST. JOHNSBURY, Vt. (WCAX) – A St. Johnsbury woman lost her husband to pancreatic cancer just 12 days after his diagnosis, and now she’s finding hope in a new drug that could change the outlook for others facing the disease.
“The doctor came in, and he wrapped the curtain around the bedside, and my life changed in an instant,” said Darcie McCann, recalling the trip to Dartmouth Health with her husband in February 2017 to help diagnose his stomach pains.
The St. Johnsbury couple left with news they never expected. “Basically said we’re almost 100% sure it’s pancreatic cancer. And I don’t think my husband understood the ramifications of that, but I sat there knowing I was going to lose him,” McCann said.
Doctors gave him six months. The cancer was so aggressive, those months turned to days. “We lost him by the end of the month; twelve days,” said McCann, who says she wishes she’d had more time. “My husband was trying to tell me all the things that I needed to know … And I had to stop him and said, ‘Sweetie, I’ll figure it out. I don’t want to spend your last night on earth talking about passwords to our computer.’”
Pancreatic cancer is among the deadliest cancers there is. Dr. Randall Holcombe, director of the University of Vermont Cancer Center, says that’s because it’s rarely caught early. “It often doesn’t have many early symptoms. And it’s often discovered when it’s already extensive and sometimes even spread to other organs like the liver,” he said.
Stage 4 patients live an average of just 12 months. But that may be changing. The FDA has approved a new drug, daraxonrasib, an oral pill that targets the gene mutation fueling the cancer’s growth. In trials, it helped patients live up to a year longer than other treatments alone.
“I don’t think we’ve had a new therapy for pancreatic cancer in the last 10 years, so it’s very exciting to have a new therapy, also a new therapy that provides significant benefit,” Holcombe said.
UVM got access before the FDA signed off, enrolling a dozen regional patients in a free, expanded access program. Now, it’s approved nationwide, but only after chemotherapy has already failed. Holcombe hopes that can change. “If we can use this medication initially rather than traditional chemotherapy, and it helps people live longer and live better than by all means, we’re going to do that, but we’ll need the clinical trials to show that,” Holcombe said.
For McCann, the news is encouraging. She can only imagine how different things might have been. “Pancreatic cancer is just awful, and anything that can be done to change the trajectory of what the survival rate is just amazing,” she said.
Doctors say this drug isn’t a cure, but it’s a step forward, and researchers believe it could eventually treat other cancers driven by the same gene. For families like Darcie’s, that kind of progress offers something they didn’t have: hope.
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