UNM Cancer Center hopeful about national effort to find cure

“I’m putting Joe in charge of Mission Control”, Obama said.

Don’t expect miracles in the administration’s last months in office. He’s director of the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins. Obama assigned Vice President Joe Biden to figure out how to speed that progress. The Society expects that more than 1.6 million in the United States people will be diagnosed with some form of cancer this year alone.

“Then I think it is possible that over the next couple of years, we’re going to have more people with certain types of bad (cancers)… who are going to live (for a) prolonged high quality time in peaceful coexistence with their disease”.

“Cancer is an important political cause because it is a mortal disease that we fear, but we fear it much less with the enormous successes we have seen since Richard Nixon’s time”.

Catching cancer before it spreads gives the patient the best survival chance, often even better than those numbers. Does it mean prevent cancer?

“We are completely thrilled that President Obama has appointed Vice President Biden to spearhead a new thrust in cancer in our lifetime”, Dr. Willman said.

MCEVERS: Medical professionals, of course, have been trying to cure cancer for decades. Some new drugs that already have been developed cost many thousands of dollars.

In reality, he explained, there are thousands of mutated genes some awake, others asleep. A “moonshot” is a awful metaphor for how to approach the treatment of cancer. A key focus will be promising advances in immunotherapy, which uses the immune system to attack tumors, and “precision medicine”, which personalizes treatments based on the genetic makeup of a patient’s tumors. The institute is part of the Big Ten Cancer Research Consortium, a coalition launched to work more closely among the 12 member universities.

Sellers asked for a meeting to discuss the Oncology Research Information Exchange Network, a Moffitt-founded consortium of 11 nationally recognized cancer centers.

“Your challenge matches the singular mission of Moffitt Cancer Center, and we have enlisted numerous nation’s most prestigious cancer institutions in this effort”.

“My grandpop used to say, “Joey, there’s three kinds of politics” – church politics, labor politics and regular politics, Biden recalled recently, before adding one of his own. What’s in the way right now of us not getting to a cure? His group wants Medicare to change that. The AACR supports a growth rate of 5 percent above the biomedical inflation rate, which is projected to be 2.4 percent in fiscal year 2016.

Harold E. Varmus, a Nobel Prize-winning cancer researcher at Weill Cornell Medical College who stepped down last March as head of the National Cancer Institute in the National Institutes of Health, said the White House can take both inspirational and administrative steps to accelerate progress.