Here’s what Vice President Biden’s cancer ‘moonshoot’ will try to do

In his State of the Union address this week, President Barack Obama said the nation will launch a new effort to research, fight and cure cancer. The cancer initiative will build upon the $2 billion increase in funding approved for the National Institutes of Health past year, White House chief economist Jason Furman told reporters ahead of Obama speech. ‘Let’s make America the country that cures cancer once and for all, ‘ he added.

No really. That was the president’s Big Bold Idea: a new national effort that he framed as a “new moonshot”-with Vice President Biden “in charge of mission control”-the goal of which will be to cure cancer “once and for all”.

The original moonshot program took more than a dozen years to get to its target, and no one expects to cure cancer in the year that Biden and Obama have left in office.

Secondly, the vice president said he’d use targeted incentives to try and facilitate coordination among anti-cancer efforts in the private sector.

“The goal of this initiative is simple - to double the rate of progress”.

Both Democrats and Republicans stood and applauded the news, but just how close are we to finding a cure for one the world’s deadliest diseases?

Biden’s son, former Delaware Attorney General Beau Biden, died in May at the age of 46 after a battle with brain cancer. Such a bold proclamation naturally begets a few questions, and the government started answering them today in a call with reporters by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which incudes the National Cancer Institute (NCI). He said Rochester has historically been and will continue to be a key player in the fight against cancer. NIH can make sharing of data a requirement of any research grants it awards, said Collins.

We agree with the vice president that cancer organizations and institutions have an obligation to advance the research by pooling our expertise and working together to bring the benefits of the science to patients as quickly as possible – especially those patients suffering from aggressive and metastatic forms of cancer.

“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”. When he formally decided not to seek the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination in October of a year ago, he said had he run he “would have wanted to have been the president that ended cancer”. Next week he plans to meet with global experts at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland and later this month he will convene the first of several meetings with cabinet secretaries and heads of agencies to discuss federal investment in cancer research. I think one of them is that just within the last decade or so, technologies have enabled us to learn the nature of cancer itself, right?

A separate coalition announced this month, called Cancer Moonshot 2020, aims to hold clinical trials for up to 20 tumor types, in as many as 20,000 patients by the year 2020.