Almost a year ago we ran a cover story highlighting the slow, grinding—but very real—progress that the world has made in the “War on Cancer” since Richard Nixon, then America’s president, first declared it in 1971. As we wrote at the time, good news often goes unreported, especially when it happens gradually, as it has with cancer.

This week’s column reports another slice of encouraging news on the same topic. Attendees at a recent cancer conference in Chicago were treated to a rare sight: an academic presentation leading to a standing ovation, complete with whoops and cheers. The cheers were for daraxonrasib, a new drug that, as the attendees were told, dramatically extends survival times for pancreatic cancer, one of the hardest-to-treat cancers there is.

Those results were dramatic enough. But they may be just the start. Besides its direct effects on the tumours, daraxonrasib also seems to unravel at least some of their defences against the immune system. Immunotherapy is a relatively new class of cancer treatment that works by encouraging the body’s immune system to attack tumours directly. Pancreatic cancer had been resistant to such treatments. If daraxonrasib can crack that resistance, then even bigger improvements in treatment (and survival) could be possible.

And it may get better still. Daraxonrasib targets a protein that is part of a group known as RAS that, when mutated or mis-regulated, drives many more cancers than just that of the pancreas. Indeed, around 20% of all cancers diagnosed every year are thought to involve such proteins. Since their discovery in the 1980s RAS proteins were thought to be untargetable with drugs. Daraxonrasib proves that they are not, potentially opening the door for an entirely new avenue of treatment.

None of this is certain, of course: plenty of promising ideas fail to pass muster in clinical trials. But it is a good example of the sort of slow but real progress that we wrote about last year: from discovery to drug took 40 years. The drug could lead to all sorts of benefits, but they in turn will take years to materialise. Progress in cancer research is never as fast as we would like. But it is real, and that is hugely encouraging.

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Scientists are not usually an excitable bunch. So when many thousands of them recently gave a spontaneous standing ovation (with cheering) in the middle of a lecture, it meant something special happened. At a conference in Chicago at the end of May oncologists went wild over the results of a drug called daraxonrasib, which treats pancreatic cancer.