Nicholas Hornstein, an assistant professor at Northwell Health, said Revolution Medicines is doing something unusual in cancer drug development: planning for resistance before its drug DaraxONRASib is fully in the world. He made the comment after the company disclosed RM-055 at AACR26, calling it a unique concept and a smart way to think about the space.
Hornstein laid out the standard path as one most drug makers follow without much deviation: build the drug, use the drug, then wait for resistance to show up and only then decide what to do next. In his view, Revolution Medicines is turning that sequence on its head by treating resistance as a known outcome rather than a surprise.
That matters because DaraxONRASib is still not fully in the world, yet the company is already building around the problem that usually arrives later. Hornstein said resistance to the drug is expected to come, and that view shaped his reaction to RM-055. He described the program as a move away from the usual run of me-too projects and toward a strategy aimed at solving the next problem before it lands.
The tension in the story is simple: the company is betting early on an eventual weakness in its own drug, while the field still tends to reward the safer habit of waiting for failure to prove itself. Hornstein’s post on LinkedIn made clear that he sees that as the point, not the flaw. In his telling, the question is no longer whether resistance will appear, but whether revolution medicines has started building fast enough to meet it.
