Vice President Joe Biden Announces New Initiative To Cure Cancer

US President Barack Obama’s announcement of a “moonshot” bid to cure cancer, continues a centuries-long quest to defeat a disease which kills over eight million people every year.

“Tonight, I’m announcing a new national effort to get it done”, the president told a joint session of Congress. “And because he’s gone to the mat for all of us on so many issues over the past 40 years, I’m putting [Vice President] Joe [Biden] in charge of mission control”.

That begins today. He’ll be hearing about innovative therapy at Penn’s Abramson Cancer Center. If hospitals pool that genetic information, researchers can more rapidly learn which drugs best match which patients, says Dr. Victor Velculescu of Johns Hopkins University and the American Association for Cancer Research. “In my terms not your medical terms we are at an inflection point in the fight against cancer”. He says that call to action inspired science and innovation, and now he says curing cancer should be this generation’s “moonshot”. “And we can cure the cancer by targeting the right genes”, said Schwartzberg, who has also been an oncologist for 30 years. But the next best thing, she says, is “making sure that it [cancer] doesn’t negatively impact a patient’s life” and laying out this aspirational goal may help provide the impetus to get there and beyond.

There’s been striking progress in recent years even though cancer remains the nation’s No. 2 killer. “By knocking down the “silos” restricting the flow of research data and expanding access to clinical trials, we can accelerate our progress toward finding a cure and help more patients utilize groundbreaking treatments”. The National Cancer Institute’s budget was increased by $260.5 million, to $5.21 billion, in the recently approved fiscal 2016 budget.

Many of his and his students’ projects have relied upon small donations from individuals to proceed, he said. 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’s a fine line between having big, hairy, audacious goals and realistic goals, so the public doesn’t come back and say in five years, ‘Hey, you didn’t deliver on that, pal’.

“We’re at the cusp of being able to do blood tests to find cancer”.

UNM Comprehensive Center was recently named a leading institution.

Still, he says the more data they can share about those mutations – and other aspects of genetics, like cell proteins – the easier it’ll be to treat or even eradicate more types of cancer more quickly. Overall, cancer death rates decreased by about 1.8% for men, and 1.4% per year for women, per year between 2002 and 2011, according to the National Cancer Institute.

“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”.

“We know the enemy now in a very detailed way”, Neel said.