Ben Sasse says a clinical trial for advanced pancreatic cancer has left him with far less pain and a sharply smaller tumor burden, even after doctors told him in December he had only three to four months to live. The 54-year-old former Nebraska senator said this month that he had a 76% reduction in tumor volume over the last four months while taking daraxonrasib, a drug now being tested for patients with hard-to-treat cancers.
Sasse said late last year he was diagnosed with stage-four pancreatic cancer that had metastasized, and he said he is now battling five cancers, including lung, vascular and liver cancer. He described the trial as a reprieve, not a cure. “I have much, much less pain than I had four months ago when I was diagnosed, and I have a massive 76% reduction in tumor volume over the last four months,” he said.
The numbers give his account unusual weight. Revolution Medicines reported this month that patients on daraxonrasib survived a median 13 months compared with roughly six months for patients on chemotherapy. Sasse is part of that trial, and his own experience tracks with the company’s early findings. For someone who was told in December that he might have only months left, even a limited response matters now because it suggests the drug may be doing more than slowing the disease.
Sasse represented Nebraska in the U.S. Senate from 2015 to 2023, and the illness has pushed him into a very different kind of public conversation. He said, “It’s weird to be in your early 50s and get a terminal diagnosis, and people all of a sudden act like you’re 93 or 94 and you have a lot of wisdom,” adding, “I don’t know that I have a lot of wisdom, but I have a lot of things that I think we should be reflecting on together.” He also said, “The lie I want to tell myself is that I’m the center of everything. And I’m going to be around forever. And I can work harder, and store up enough, that I can atone for my own brokenness. I can’t,” and then added, “And so, I hate cancer. But I’m also grateful for it. I tell a lot more truth to myself than I used to do it when I thought I was super omnicompetent and interesting.”
That self-examination leads to politics, and Sasse has not softened his criticism of Washington. He said neither party is properly preparing for the pressures ahead, pointing to artificial intelligence and the digital revolution, and arguing that Congress ignores the disruption of work as a basic issue. “We’ve never lived in a world where 22-year-olds couldn’t assume that the work they did, they would be able to do until death or retirement. And we’re never going to have that world again,” he said. “Congress doesn’t talk about any of those kind of most fundamental issues. The disruption of work, for good and for ill, should be front and central. Congress doesn’t even know how to have that conversation.” He said Americans should care more about local communities than political tribes, and added that cameras everywhere in Washington have pushed lawmakers toward sound bites instead of substance.
What Sasse is saying, in the end, is not that illness has made him sentimental. It has made him more impatient with habits in public life that he now sees as small. If the treatment keeps working, he may have more time than doctors first feared. But his larger argument is already clear: the country, he said, is spending too much of its attention on the wrong things, and too little on the work and technology changes that will shape the next decade.
