Obama: ‘Let’s make America the country that cures cancer’

Don’t expect miracles in the administration’s last months in office.

Ravindran said there are already cancers that a cure has been discovered but the treatment can be costly.

“These big priorities then have to get trickled down through organizations that have to make decisions about where to spend their time and money”, she said. He said it was possible to end cancer, once and for all.

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

Catching cancer before it spreads gives the patient the best survival chance, often even better than those numbers. The president commissioned his vice president, Joe Biden, whose son Beau, recently died of brain cancer to lead the effort.

Getting information from great numbers of cancer patients and analyzing the data “could provide quick and important advances”, Otis Brawley, M.D., chief medical and scientific officer for the American Cancer Society and professor at Emory University, tells STAT.

“The goal of curing cancer or eliminating cancer is a laudable one”.

Ravindran said despite his skepticism on the short term success of the program he does believe in another 20 years, the fight on cancer will be further along the road to a cure.

“In addition to making these advances and testing these advances in patients seen here, we really need to work very hard with community centers to make sure these things are widely available”, Hohl said.

The first immunotherapies essentially strip away some of the ways that tumors hide, without as many side effects as chemo. And giving people ready access to treatment can help save more lives.

“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”, he wrote.

The U.S. president promised not to dwell on the past.

“I want to make sure that you don’t get cancer tomorrow that your children don’t get cancer in ten years”, said Pienta.

“We’ll encourage leading cancer centers to reach unprecedented levels of cooperation, so we can learn more about this bad disease and how to stop it in its tracks”.

The White House’s cancer initiative is to go along with last year’s $2 billion increase in funding that was given to the National Institutes of Health. “We hope members of Congress embrace this historic opportunity to reduce death and suffering from cancer”.