Biden coming to Philly to launch mission to cure cancer

Vice President Joe Biden will launch his effort to find a cure for cancer Friday in Philadelphia, with a visit to the University of Pennsylvania’s Abramson Cancer Center at the school’s Perelman School of Medicine. The National Cancer Institute’s budget was increased by $260.5 million, to $5.21 billion, in the recently approved fiscal 2016 budget.

In his announcement, Obama put Vice President Joe Biden in charge of the effort.

Even President Barack Obama, quizzed by a fourth-grader, said Thursday that cancer “probably won’t be cured in my lifetime, but I think it’ll be cured in yours”.

A highlight of President Obama’s last State of the Union address was his call to arms in the fight against cancer. “The process of discovering new cures and treatments for patients in need relies upon an ecosystem of innovation in which all stakeholders, including government agencies and regulators, academic research institutions, private industry and patient groups, play a critical role, ‘ stated BIO’s president and chief executive, Jim Greenwood”.

Dr. Jonathan Friedberg, director of The University of Rochester’s Wilmot Cancer Institute, agrees. The goal is “to accelerate our efforts to progress toward a cure and to unleash new discoveries and breakthroughs for other deadly diseases”, he added.

This week Vice President Biden said “the goal is to seize this moment”. And now, cancer experts are calling on Biden to unlock patient data that holds the potential to help researchers, but that is almost impossible to share. “They don’t feel that primal fear”.

Obama announced the effort in his speech Tuesday night, drawing cheers from both sides of the aisle. “It’s just that it’s not a cure at this point, but there are many cancers that we couldn’t in years past”. Radiotherapy can cure cancer of the voice box and thyroid cancer. The vast majority of Hodgkin’s lymphomas can be sent into remission.

While one out of every four cancer deaths is because of lung cancer, the rate of new lung cancer cases has continued to decline as fewer people smoke.

Immunotherapy combines more than one highly specialized drug to fortify the body’s immune system and enable its disease-fighting cells to attack tumors. As per the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network, it is the greatest increase in funding since 2003.

“It has been such a challenge with federal funding that we spent the last three years asking ourselves if this is the new normal, and if it is, how are we going to realize our mission”, he said. NIH can make sharing of data a requirement of any research grants it awards, said Collins.

These are part of treatments for cancers that are no longer necessarily considered a death sentence.

“We know the enemy now in a very detailed way”, Neel said. It’s as if we’re trying to get to the moon, but there are dozens of moons, and we don’t know where they are, or what a rocket is.