FDA approves Novocure's tumor-treating fields for pancreatic cancer

On 11 February 2026 the US Food and Drug Administration approved Optune Pax, a wearable device made by Novocure, for adults with locally advanced pancreatic cancer, to be used alongside the chemotherapy drugs gemcitabine and nab-paclitaxel. Oncology publications described it as the first new treatment for this form of the disease in decades.

The device delivers Tumor Treating Fields, low-intensity alternating electric fields applied through patches on the skin, which interfere with cancer cells as they try to divide. The approval rested on the phase 3 PANOVA-3 trial, which randomly assigned 571 patients to chemotherapy with or without the device. Median overall survival was 16.2 months with the device against 14.2 months without it, and the share of patients alive after one year rose from about 60 percent to 68 percent. Patients using the device also went considerably longer before their pain worsened, a median of 15.2 months against 9.1. The main side effect was skin irritation under the patches; there was no increase in chemotherapy side effects.

The technology was the life's work of Professor Yoram Palti, a Haifa-born physician and biophysicist who taught physiology at the Technion and headed its Rappaport medical research institute from 1982 to 1993. Revisiting the subject of his doctoral thesis, the behaviour of electric fields in nerve fibres, he began calculating whether such fields could disrupt cancer cells, working at first in a laboratory in his basement. He founded Novocure in 2000. Tumor Treating Fields were previously approved in the US for glioblastoma, mesothelioma and lung cancer, and Palti received the Israel Prize for entrepreneurship and technological innovation in 2022.

Palti did not live to see the pancreatic approval: he died on 11 January 2026, aged 88, one month before the FDA's decision.