Anna Berkenblit, MD, MMSc

Dr. @ABerkenblit, PanCAN's Chief Scientific and Medical Officer, shares: "A new location. Record numbers of attendees, poster presentations and talks. A buzz of energy — of hope and optimism — that I’ve never seen before at a pancreatic cancer conference. This year’s PanCAN Scientific Summit was an event to remember. Hosted in sunny San Diego, the Summit brought together PanCAN’s Community for Progress, including research grant recipients, Scientific and Medical Advisory Board members, Industry Champions, patient research advocates, members of our Board of Directors and other special guests. Everyone in the room was there with a shared purpose — to turn science into survival. The opening reception showcased 27 posters, representing clinical progress from Industry Champions and scientific updates from grantees and users of our SPARK health data platform. We were also delighted to invite nine travel scholars to attend the conference — graduate students and postdoctoral fellows who displayed posters of their research projects and received feedback from experts in the field. One of the happiest outcomes was the strong comradery amongst the travel scholars — trainees who are working hard to establish their own careers as pancreatic cancer researchers and now have a network of new mentors and peers to lean on for support. As we were preparing the agenda for this year’s Scientific Summit, we knew we had to spotlight RAS — a protein mutated in more than 90% of pancreatic tumors that was considered undruggable for decades — until now. In August of this year, the first RAS-targeting drug for patients with pancreatic cancer was approved after showing a doubling of overall survival compared to chemotherapy in a recent clinical trial. Today, there are more than 80 different RAS-targeting drugs in clinical development for treating cancer. As we look forward to navigating this new era of treatment options for pancreatic cancer, we also took the opportunity to look back on what it took to get here. Three of the world’s leading experts on RAS biology — Drs. Dafna Bar-Sagi, Channing Der and Frank McCormick — sat down to discuss whether RAS would ever be a druggable target at a PanCAN Scientific Meeting back in 2016. Ten years later, we were able to reassemble the three of them alongside Dr. Brian Wolpin, the principal investigator for the RASolute-302 clinical trial that led to the approval of RASONQUE™ (daraxonrasib), for a robust discussion about the past, present and future of studying and targeting RAS. The excitement was palpable as the discussion turned to how various stakeholders — scientists, clinicians, industry, patient advocates, regulatory agencies and more — are working together to incorporate RAS inhibition into the treatment of pancreatic cancer and aiming to make it even more effective." Read more in a special edition of Dr. Berkenblit's Research Spotlight at 🔗 pcan.at/2a6a08mz.

Great start to @DAVAOnc GI Summit in beautiful Bermuda 🇧🇲 w/ focus on the history, scientific journey, & explosion 💥 of RAS inhibitors in #PancreaticCancer @cjder23 @DrShubhamPant @md_oberstein @aberkenblit —the future is brighter for our patients than its ever been🔆 #DAVAGI