RevMed's pancreatic cancer pill priced above $475,000 a year

Robert Langreth and Madison Muller, Bloomberg News on Aug 26, 2026

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Revolution Medicines Inc. won U.S. approval for a breakthrough pill that lengthens the lives of patients with advanced pancreatic cancer, a major advance against one of the hardest-to-treat tumor types.

The once-daily drug carries a list price of more than $475,000 a year, making it one of the most expensive cancer treatments in history. The company branded it Rasonque and made it available starting Wednesday.

It’s one of the first medicines to broadly target RAS, a protein tied to tumor growth that’s mutated in most pancreatic cancers. The approval opens a new front against a disease where treatment has advanced slowly.

Pancreatic cancer is often diagnosed after it has spread, leaving patients with just months to live. But in trials, RevMed’s drug nearly doubled typical survival time for those with an aggressive form of the disease. In a late-stage study published in May, patients who received chemotherapy — the current standard of treatment — lived for just 6.7 months, while those given Rasonque lived for more than 13 months.

“For patients and families facing metastatic pancreatic cancer, this approval represents an advance that has been long awaited and long deserved,” Brian Wolpin, director of the Hale Family Center for Pancreatic Cancer Research at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, said in a statement.

Rasonque was approved for patients with metastatic disease who had already received chemotherapy or who weren’t candidates for such multidrug regimens. Side effects include rash and mouth sores, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which expedited its approval.

On Wall Street, excitement about the drug has been building for months. RevMed’s shares rose 1.9% in New York on Wednesday and have more than doubled since April, giving the company a market value exceeding $46 billion.

Earlier this year, reports suggested that both AbbVie Inc. and Merck & Co. had been eyeing a potential deal with RevMed, though the talks later fizzled out.

Pancreatic cancer has a high mortality rate, with just 13% of patients surviving five years. Over 67,000 people will be diagnosed with it this year and more than 52,000 will die from the condition, according to the American Cancer Society.

Crucially, the option to take Rasonque at home may allow patients with incurable disease to spend more time with their families, instead of getting an infusion at a cancer center. RevMed is also conducting trials to expand its use to earlier stages of pancreatic disease, as well as testing its potential in lung cancer.

Researchers struggled for years to design drugs that worked against all forms of RAS until RevMed crafted an innovative “molecular glue” approach that essentially smothered the dangerous protein.

“It’s a huge advance,” Eileen O’Reilly, an oncologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center who was a lead author of the final stage trial, said in an interview before the decision was announced.

Wall Street analysts expect the drug to generate more than $9 billion in sales by 2032, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The drug got another jolt of publicity in April when former U.S. Senator Ben Sasse said he was taking it after being diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer.

Demand from patients and their families was intense in the lead-up to the approval.

“This will be one of the most rapid drug launches ever,” TD Cowen analyst Tyler Van Buren said in a research note.

In May, the FDA allowed RevMed to open a special expanded access program so patients who didn’t qualify for ongoing clinical trials could get the drug. Through early August, the company said it had provided the drug through the access program for over 2,000 patients. Many will now become paying customers following the formal approval.

Jefferies analyst Faisal Khurshid told Bloomberg that Rasonque’s price of $39,800 a month was within a range of what Wall Street had estimated, and “relative to the unprecedented survival benefit in a high unmet need setting, and recent comparables for oncology drug approvals, the price seems fair.”

The drug also received an ultra-rapid review as part of a new FDA voucher program that’s meant to help expedite promising medicines. In a statement, the FDA said it reviewed the drug 6.5 months ahead of a regulatory deadline.

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(With assistance from Melos Ambaye.)