NEBRASKA — Former U.S. Senator Ben Sasse publicly revealed in late December that he has stage-four pancreatic cancer and said an experimental oral medication called daraxonrasib has shrunk his tumor volume by 76% over the last four months. His cancer has metastasized to his lungs, vascular system, liver and lymphatic system. At the time of his diagnosis he was told his life expectancy was three to four months, a prognosis he has since outlived.

"So maybe I'm going to crank and live a year instead of a handful of months, and I'd feel incredibly blessed," Sasse said. He said he owes his extra time on earth to providence, prayer and the drug, and that he now experiences much less pain partly due to morphine.

Daraxonrasib inhibits a protein that can cause cells to grow excessively, leading to tumors. Revolution Medicines reported results from the drug's phase three trial earlier this month, with patients who took daraxonrasib surviving by a median of 13.2 months compared with 6.7 months for patients receiving chemotherapy. Tens of thousands of Americans are diagnosed with pancreatic cancer annually, and the disease has a low survival rate.

Sasse, a Nebraska native with a Ph.D. in history from Yale University, ran for the U.S. Senate in 2014 and later won reelection after clashing with President Trump. He cosponsored the 2018 federal right-to-try law, which is designed to make it easier for patients with life-threatening illnesses to access not-yet-approved drugs in some circumstances. He said the law was amended in Congress to make it stricter than initially planned.

He said he wants to spend some of his remaining time talking about expanding patient access to experimental treatments. "I'd like to decentralize a lot more of those decisions to individuals, patients and their care providers, rather than one-size-fits-all rules at the FDA," he said. "And so I would love a world where on the [question of] how much risk are you willing to endure to get access to a new trial or to allow our greatest scientific minds and researchers to experiment, I'd like to open up the dial quite a bit and let a lot more people get access to these drugs."