Biden sees politics of cancer world as obstacle to a cure

And Thursday, during a teleconference with reporters to discuss President Obama’s State of the Union call for a stepped-up war on cancer, the National Cancer Institute’s acting director, Douglas R. Lowy, stressed that his agency is nearing completion on an effort of its own.

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

“What does “cure cancer” mean?”

In addition to his work to increase cancer research funding, Fattah has been the key champion in Congress for strengthening our understanding of the human brain and investing federal dollars towards neuroscience research as a means to find cures and treatment for brain disease and disorders, including brain cancer.

Academic researchers and industry need to interact more openly and effectively, and more patients, particularly the less affluent, must be convinced to participate in clinical trials, he said.

Few details have been made public about the new federal initiative, but Biden wrote in blog post Monday, after Obama’s address, that cancer “research and therapies are on the cusp” of breakthroughs, and his goal is to accelerate new discoveries. With breakthrough advancements in medical science, new drugs and therapies have yielded optimistic results but treatments are still way too expensive for most Americans.

Dr. Schuchter says its been a revolutionary approach to treating patients with leukemia, and now a type of blood cancer called myleoma. “It’s not just about developing game-changing treatments – it’s about delivering them to those who need them”.

Biden’s advocacy has been cited as a reason for the bipartisan support of last month’s budget agreement giving another $2 billion to the National Institutes of Health, the biggest increase in more than a decade.

The American Cancer Society estimated 1,658,370 new cancer cases diagnosed and 589,430 cancer deaths in the United States in 2015. Ted Kaufman, a Biden confidante for many decades.

For many scientists and researchers, the White House’s push for sustained government support for research is also encouraging.

Friday’s roundtable discussion with medical researchers at the University of Pennsylvania was Biden’s first public event on cancer since then. “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.

“There has been quite a bit of money put into this (since the 1970s) but it has not been sustained”, van Golen said.

Biden planned to continue the effort next week by convening global cancer experts at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

One in particular has shown promise in mice, Van Golen said.

Moffitt is a leader with precision medicine and immunotherapy, harnessing the immune system to cure cancer.

“My family is a normal family in that ours has been touched by cancer”, Biden said in his opening remarks.

Now that cancer is considered a disease of the genome, with at least hundreds of variations, access to information about common mutations and the efforts to fight them is considered critical for progress against the disease.

“You have a unique position from being able to speak from not one chair, but how everybody thinks”, Gutmann said.