Reaction to Obama’s call for cancer cure

Yet is such a goal truly achievable in the near future? The shape of this particular moonshot is still indistinct, but the basic elements are coming into focus: more federal money, better data sharing between scientists and doctors, and giving a big pair of red-tape-cutting scissors to Biden, whose son Beau died of brain cancer last May. “A cure is a long way off”, but the prospect for some specific cancers does look bright, says James Allison, chair of the Department of Immunology at The University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

Associate Professor Mark Pershouse says he hopes the President’s call for action is real.

Biden is calling this his “moonshot” – comparing his initiative to a mission to the moon 55 years ago. But the hottest frontier is immunotherapy – tapping the body’s immune system to attack tumors, like the drug credited with helping treat former President Jimmy Carter’s advanced melanoma. “And we can cure the cancer by targeting the right genes”, said Schwartzberg, who has also been an oncologist for 30 years.

President Obama has mentioned cancer in all but one of his State of the Union addresses.

The U.S. has pumped hundreds of billions of dollars into cancer research in the past four decades and for all the breakthroughs we’ve made – and there have been a few – population-adjusted cancer mortality has barely budged since the 1950s. “For that reason, I think it was flawless to use that terminology”.

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

“If we had this happen during the Reagan era, we didn’t have the science to take this far enough”, Curran said.

Still, even agreeing on the definition of “cure” remains controversial. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., who has worked with Biden to increase cancer funding. But whereas some “old school surgeons” would see potentially suspicious dark scar tissue on a CT (computed tomography) scan and say you can not say cancer is “cured”, Allison maintains if there is no real evidence that a person still has cancer and they have been in remission for 10 years, “for all intents and purposes it is cured”.

Dr. Marc Siegel is medical director of Doctor Radio at NYU Langone Medical Center and a Fox News medical correspondent. This year, experts predicted that there will be more than 1.6 million new cases of the disease as well as more than 595,000 deaths in the USA alone. “That knowledge has reached the point of maturity that has given us actionable information to make a decisive assault on cancer”.

Cancer is more than 200 illnesses with uncontrolled cell growth (or mitoses) in common. Cancer will certainly remain part of the human condition but the question is how best to tamp it down when it does appear.

The Wilmot Cancer Institute, which is viewed as a national leader in cancer research, is actively recruiting more scientists to join its research team in hopes of securing more federal grants. “When we share our findings, we are better for it”, Brawley said. “Obviously that’s in the way of curing cancer because we want a treatment that a patient will never develop resistance to”. “They realize there is one year so there is a sense of urgency, there’s no question”.

All of that will be vital in an accelerated war to conquer cancer. That effort, alongside its public relations campaign, fueled unrealistic expectations that cancer would be quickly extinguished. America has had a 40% decline in the age-adjusted breast cancer death rate since the early 1990s. This legislation provided money and programs that have been useful in determining the causes of cancer and outlining interventions to prevent it and have given us a tremendous understanding of the cellular and molecular biology of cancer. “To use a Texas term, we finally have purchase on it”.