Moonshot to cure cancer? We’ve heard that before. Many times

“We knew where the moon was and generally how to get there, cancer is much more complicated”, said Dr. Thomas Sellers, the director of Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa.

Sellers reached out to Vice President, Joe Biden in November through a letter.

When it launches this summer, the Genomic Data Commons will be able to hold data from as many as 50,000 patients and clinical trial participants, including genomic analysis of their cancers, the treatments used, their responses and outcomes, Lowy said. After his 46-year-old son, Beau Biden, died from brain cancer in May, Biden entered a period of painfully public mourning, followed eventually by his decision against getting into the presidential race.

A cure for cancer, compared to the moon landing in 1969, might be even more hard.

Though the the National Cancer Institute will receive a $264mincrease in federal funding this year – an influx that Biden helped secure in December’s spending bill – researchers and policy advocates said that federal funding for medical research had fallen short for many years before that.

According to the American Cancer Society, it is the greatest funding since 2003.

“Curing cancer is tough and the biological variation in cancer types is profound and presents a big problem with all the different mutations in difference cancers”, said Nobel Prize-winning scientist Dr. Harold Varmus.

Biden acknowledged that some cancers can’t be cured, insisting he wasn’t naive.

Yet the death rate is dropping – by 23 percent since its peak in 1991.

The program is made up of teams of doctors and researchers looking to cure various forms of cancer including breast, ovarian, leukemia, lung, prostate, melanoma and more. With breakthrough advancements in medical science, new drugs and therapies have yielded optimistic results but treatments are still way too expensive for most Americans. With a concerted effort to push existing scientific progress forward across a broad front – and to integrate those findings – cancers can become diseases not to be uniformly dreaded but to be treated, managed and, quite often, cured, they said.

“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”. Treatments that go after both – each cancer’s unique features (including genetic signatures) and all cancers’ shared traits (say, that they all seek to overwhelm the immune system) – are, slowly and steadily, gaining traction.

Calling for a cure “is not overselling”, Neel said. A connection between the state’s history as a chemical producer and cancer incidents has not been found, she said.

“Cancer will not end with a bang but with a whimper”, he said.

Presidents have been promising to do just that for 45 years.