Here’s What Vice President Biden’s Cancer ‘Moonshot’ Will Try To Do

“Cancer is way more complex than anyone had imagined in 1970”, said Dr Jose Baselga, president of the American Association for Cancer Research and physician in chief and chief medical officer at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.

In November, Sellers wrote a letter to the vice president.

President Barack Obama’s announcement during his State of the Union of a nationwide initiative to fight and cure cancer was lauded by U.S. Rep. Patrick Meehan (R-PA).

“I know that we can help solidify a genuine global commitment to end cancer as we know it today-and inspire a new generation of scientists to pursue new discoveries and the bounds of human endeavor”, Biden said on the online publishing forum Medium.com.

It’s a noble goal, of course. “I don’t think any of us are naive and think there is some magic bullet sitting under our thumb that is going to miraculously turn into a cure, but that’s where we have to aim-to cure”, she says. Or perhaps, that cancer is just a really, really tough biological hombre?

Schilsky says there’s broad agreement the nation could speed up the development of new cancer treatments if researchers could get their hands on larger data sets. Several of them had met with Biden, together with representatives from agencies like the NCI and Food and Drug Administration. He anticipates that the NIH will get as much as a 7 percent budget boost in the president’s budget, which comes out in February. “If I could have been anything, I would have wanted to be the president that ended cancer”, he said.

Research alone won’t be enough. In 1971 he declared a war on cancer, a concerted effort to find the magic elixir that would cure the terror within seven years.

An injection of federal dollars into cancer trials and research could also be a boon to some biotech firms. “Right, like that’s going to happen”, he said.

As the product of genetic mutations, each person’s cancer is a bit different. Its first clinical trial is supposed to kick off this year.

The president credits Biden with helping to make that increase possible, and Blunt says he spoke with Biden earlier Tuesday about what Blunt thought Biden could do “to make that not just a one-year event”. Even some ovarian cancers and lymphomas that don’t go away completely can now be treated more like a chronic illness that can be managed if watched and treated. As so-called precision medicine arrives, people increasingly will be treated for their tumor’s molecular signature.

Statistics from the American Cancer Society predict 600,000 people will die from the disease this year, and 1.6 million men and women will be diagnosed.

Needless to say, cancer wasn’t conquered so…

“We’ll be able to say, okay, if you have this particular genome, you may not respond to this particular treatment”. “They don’t all fail, but the majority fail”.

But advisers said in addition to pushing for more funding, Biden would use his influence to encourage data-sharing about patients and treatment outcomes, so researchers from various institutions can better build on each other’s work.

Despite the progress against cancer, however, it is still the number-two killer in the US after heart disease.

The Obama administration has launched a “moonshot” initiative to cure cancer that will involve increasing resources – both private and public – to fight cancer and break down walls between disciplines in the oncology arena.

“Keep in mind we didn’t even know that genes cause cancer 50 years ago”, he tells us. As a talking point, it’s not as good as “find a cure”, but it’s still pretty solid.