VP Biden Launches Goal To Find Cure For Cancer In Philly

President Obama, in his State of the Union address earlier this week, tasked the vice president with a “moonshot” effort to find a cure for cancer.

“For the loved ones we’ve all lost, for the families that we can still save, let’s make America the country that cures cancer once and for all”, said the Mr. Obama. Biden already is credited with having helped push through Congress a budget package last month that, among other things, increased the NIH’s cancer funding by $260 million this year.

Scientists then were just as skeptical as they are now, arguing that it’s inappropriate to call for a single, triumphal moonshot when cancer isn’t one disease but many.

Meehan was joined at the State of the Union by President and CEO of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia Madeline Bell. Now, Obama is saying the same about efforts to fight cancer. The country needs a “moon shot” to cure cancer, he said.

The flow of cancer research funding has slowed from both public and private sources during the past decade for smaller research institutions, said Dr. Kenneth van Golen, a cancer scientist at the University of Delaware’s Department of Biological Science.

He said it’s important to remember there are at least 200 kinds of cancer. “What we’re going to see is more and more cancers getting cured more and more often”.

He added more recent research showed oncologists how to use the patient’s own immune system to target and fight the cancer.

Testicular cancer, Hodgkin’s lymphoma and many adult cases of leukemia can be cured or at least turned into manageable or suppressed disease.

Genetic differences inside tumors help explain why one person’s cancer is more aggressive than another’s, and why certain drugs work for one patient but not the next, especially newer “targeted therapies” that are created to home in on certain characteristics.

“We have a line of sight to make a decisive assault on the problem”, he said.

“If we had this happen during the Reagan era, we didn’t have the science to take this far enough”, Curran said. “That’s just not realistic”, said Dr. George Demetri, a Harvard Medical School professor and researcher at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute who met with Biden’s staff. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., who has worked with Biden to increase cancer funding. “By knocking down the “silos” restricting the flow of research data and expanding access to clinical trials, we can accelerate our progress toward finding a cure and help more patients utilize groundbreaking treatments”.

The NCI portal, which was announced in December 2014, will open with two big data sets containing information from the Therapeutically Applicable Research to Generate Effective Treatments (TARGET) program and the Cancer Genome Atlas. But he said he thought it was possible to double the rate of scientific advances. Into “where a lot of the cancer research is being done”. And because he’s gone to the mat for all of us, on so many issues over the past 40 years, I’m putting Joe [Biden] in charge of Mission Control.