Ben Sasse was diagnosed with metastasized, stage-four pancreatic cancer in December 2025 and was given three to four months to live.
He is now several months past that prognosis, and on April 26, 2026, he sat down with 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley and participated in a CBS News town hall to talk about what he calls “providence, prayer and a miracle drug,” an experimental oral medication called daraxonrasib that has reduced his tumor volume by 76 percent.
He has lung cancer, vascular cancer, liver cancer and lymphoma. He is on extended time that his doctors did not initially predict he would have.
He used some of that time on Sunday to talk about pancreatic cancer, experimental drug access, artificial intelligence, and what he thinks is wrong with the United States Congress.
It was a wide-ranging appearance from a man who says he is trying to spend what remains of his time talking about “bigger stuff.”
What Did Sasse’s Diagnosis Look Like?
On December 23, 2025, Sasse posted on X without softening the news. “Last week I was diagnosed with metastasized, stage-four pancreatic cancer, and am gonna die,” he wrote. “Advanced pancreatic is nasty stuff; it’s a death sentence.” He added, “I’m not going down without a fight.” And: “death is a wicked thief… I’ve got less time than I’d prefer.”
Pancreatic cancer is the deadliest of the major cancers. Only 13 percent of patients survive five years after diagnosis, a number that has not changed meaningfully despite the advances in immunotherapy and other treatments that have transformed outcomes for other cancer types.
When it metastasizes, which Sasse’s had already done before he received his diagnosis, it spreads to surrounding organs.
In his case that meant the cancer reached his lungs, his vascular system, his liver and his lymph nodes.
His doctors at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Dr. Shubham Pant and Dr. Bob Wolff, gave him three to four months. That window has now passed.
He described his oncologists to The New York Times with an image that captures the incremental nature of the work:
“They describe their work as being up here with a little pickax on a giant Hoover Dam working on pancreatic cancer. They get little cracks at the top and sometimes little bits of water splash over and there’s somebody else doing it 400 meters over.”
The Drug That Extended His Life
The reason Sasse is still alive, by his own account, is an experimental oral medication called daraxonrasib, made by Revolution Medicines.
The drug works by targeting a defective KRAS gene, inhibiting the protein that gene produces, which signals cancer cells to grow uncontrollably.
By blocking that signal, the drug interrupts the biological instruction that drives tumor growth.
Sasse has been in a clinical trial for the drug for approximately four months.
In that time, his tumor volume has been reduced by 76 percent. His pain levels are down approximately 80 percent from where they were at the time of diagnosis.
The treatment comes with side effects, he has dealt with nausea and bleeding on his face from taking the medication. During a New York Times podcast interview earlier this year, his face was visibly covered in dried blood from the drug’s effects. He discussed it without apparent self-pity.
The Phase 3 trial results for daraxonrasib were released earlier in April 2026. Patients who took the drug survived a median of 13.2 months, compared to 6.7 months for patients on standard chemotherapy, nearly double the survival time.
If those results hold up through the approval process, daraxonrasib could become the first targeted treatment ever approved specifically for pancreatic cancer.
Revolution Medicines’ stock has risen nearly 185 percent over the past year on the strength of this data and the attention Sasse’s case has brought to the drug.
RBC Capital Markets analyst Leonid Timashev described the results as “incredibly important” and noted that oncologists have described the drug in terms that suggest it could represent a genuine turning point for a disease that has resisted meaningful therapeutic advances for decades.
Sasse Pushing For More Experimental Treatments
Sasse used his CBS News town hall appearance to make a policy argument that is personal to him in the most direct way possible.
He believes more Americans should have access to experimental treatments like the one keeping him alive. The “right to try” framework, which allows terminally ill patients to seek access to drugs that have not yet completed the full FDA approval process, is something he wants expanded and better utilized.
During the town hall, he heard from Mike Hugo, a 37-year-old man diagnosed four years ago with glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer that typically kills patients within months.
Hugo participated in a clinical trial for a medical device called Optune. His daughters were 5 and 7 years old when he was diagnosed.
They are 9 and 11 now. He has attended two daddy-daughter dances that, by the original prognosis, he should not have lived to see.
That is the argument in its most human form. Experimental treatments, accessed through clinical trials, have given both men time that the standard of care did not predict they would have.
Sasse believes the system that channels people toward those trials should be more accessible and more widely understood.
Who Is Ben Sasse?
Sasse is 54 years old and was born in Plainview, Nebraska. He attended Harvard for his undergraduate degree, St. John’s College for a master’s degree, and Yale for a PhD in history.
He was elected to the U.S. Senate from Nebraska in 2014 and reelected in 2020, serving two terms as a Republican senator who became known for being one of the more vocal Republican critics of Donald Trump during his Senate tenure. He voted to convict Trump in the second impeachment trial.
In January 2023, he resigned from the Senate to become the 13th president of the University of Florida, a position he held for 17 months before resigning in July 2024, citing his wife Melissa’s epilepsy diagnosis and her struggles with memory issues.
He and Melissa have been married for 31 years and have three children. He has been characteristically blunt about what matters to him:
“The best thing you can do is be called dad or mom, lover, neighbor, friend. Governor? Senator? House member? It’s a great way to serve. It should be your 11th calling or maybe sixth, but never top.”
What He Said About Congress And AI
Sasse used the 60 Minutes platform for something broader than a health update.
He called the Senate “very, very unproductive” and said Congress is consumed by what he called “reductionistic tribalism,” a social media-driven incentive structure that rewards outrage and punishes the kind of deliberative, humble, long-form thinking that he believes a functioning republic requires.
“The Senate needs to be less like Instagram,” he told Pelley. “The Senate needs to be more deliberative. And that means less smack-down nonsense.”
He believes the House should have 2,000 members instead of 435, so that each representative would be accountable to a smaller and more specific constituency.
Sasse said neither party has serious ideas about what the country needs in 2030 or 2050, and that artificial intelligence is the most urgent issue Congress is ignoring.
He called AI “glorious and horrific at the same time” and predicted it will routinize most economic activity, eliminating the assumption that young people can expect to do the same work throughout their careers.
“It’s pretty scary to not know what you’re going to do to add value for your neighbor 10 or 25 years from now,” he said. “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 was asked about the long-term survival of the American republic. His answer was both measured and sobering. “In 2040, or 2050, or 2060 does the republic survive? I suspect yes, and I would bet yes. But it’s not a 90/10 bet.”
A man who was told he had three to four months to live is now appearing on national television, 76 percent fewer tumors than he started with, making the case that the country he served should start thinking about what comes next.
He credits providence, prayer and a drug that did not exist as a standard treatment when he was diagnosed.
