Ben Sasse says a clinical trial has cut his tumor volume by 76% in four months, easing the pain that followed a late-last-year diagnosis of stage-four pancreatic cancer. The former Nebraska senator said he was told in December that he had three to four months to live and that the disease had already metastasized.
Sasse, 54, said he is now battling five cancers, including lung, vascular and liver cancer, but called the drug he is taking, daraxonrasib, a miracle. He said he has much less pain than he did four months ago and that the treatment has changed the shape of what doctors first told him to expect.
The news matters because pancreatic cancer remains among the deadliest cancers, and Sasse’s experience lands just as Revolution Medicines reported this month that patients on daraxonrasib survived a median 13 months, compared with roughly six months for those on chemotherapy. The company’s data do not mean the drug is a cure, but they put real numbers behind the possibility that some patients may live longer and more comfortably than standard treatment alone would allow.
Sasse represented Nebraska in the U.S. Senate from 2015 to 2023, and he used the diagnosis to argue for a broader look at the country’s future. He said neither political party is properly focused on the challenges America will face in the coming decades, pointing to artificial intelligence and the digital revolution as issues that deserve more attention. Congress, he said, does not treat the disruption of work as a fundamental issue, even though he believes the labor market is headed for a world in which young workers can no longer assume they will keep the same job until retirement.
He also said lawmakers have become too focused on sound bites because cameras are everywhere in Washington, a dynamic he said has crowded out substance. In his telling, the deeper problem is a national politics that rewards tribal loyalty over community and makes it harder to talk honestly about the future. For now, though, the immediate story is simpler: a man who was given months to live says treatment has given him more time, less pain and a reason to speak more plainly about what comes next.