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The worst kind of cancer suddenly isn’t so scary anymore

In a family of killer diseases, pancreatic cancer has long been one of the scariest. It could grow undetected for years, and by the time most people knew something was wrong, their prognosis was grim. The vast majority of patients, nearly 90 percent, would die within the first five years of their diagnosis. Even as other cancers saw their mortality rates drop in recent years, pancreatic cancer’s death rate actually increased slightly from 1999 to 2020. And despite their best efforts, scientists felt stuck. In the 1980s, they identified a gene, KRAS, that seemed to be pivotal to the u...