PARIS, April 23 -- After decades of struggling to find a way to treat pancreatic cancer, researchers have developed several promising new drugs that could offer rare hope to patients given this particularly deadly diagnosis.

Pancreatic cancer is notoriously aggressive, with only roughly one in 10 people surviving more than five years after being diagnosed, research has shown.

Rates of this cancer have also been surging worldwide, notably among young adults. It is projected to become the second deadliest cancer, after lung cancer, in developed countries in the coming years.

Despite the scale of this scourge, there has not been "any medical progress for 40 years," Patrick Mehlen, a researcher at France's Leon Berard cancer centre, told A...