President Barack Obama tasked Biden with the mission in his State of the Union address Tuesday night.
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“Last month, [the Vice President] worked with this Congress to give scientists at the National Institutes of Health the strongest resources they’ve had in over a decade”, said Obama. ‘Let’s make America the country that cures cancer once and for all, ‘ he added.
NELSON: I think that’s a reasonable metaphor. And of course, he named the vice president of the United States, Joe Biden, as manning mission control because he’s someone who’s been personally affected by cancer in his family and, I think, the notion that we have learned a lot about the nature of cancer. “Tonight, I’m announcing a new national effort to get it done”, Obama said during his speech.
On the matter, Biden said, “It’s personal for me”.
The American Cancer Society predicts there will be almost 1.7 million new cancer cases this year, and more than 595,000 deaths.
Boosting collaboration is one of the goals Biden said he’ll have for the initiative, writing in an online statement that he hopes to increase both public and private funding for fighting cancer and to “break down silos” that prevent research results from being quickly translated into care for patients.
The aim, he said, is to get them and others on board to “seize this moment” and “unleash new discoveries and breakthroughs” to fight cancer and other diseases. Biden’s son, Beau, died of brain cancer at the age of 46 last May.
“I’m behind Joe Biden if they can help and he can find a way, they can help cure cancer, why not?”
Although specific details of the initiative were not provided in the address, Biden will officially launch the effort on Friday when he visits the Abramson Cancer Center at University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine.
In the following campaign, Republican presidential nominee George W. Bush returned to the space metaphor. He promised to “fund and lead a medical moonshot to reach far beyond what seems possible today”, to cure not just cancer but many ills associated with aging.
Though many Americans were asking one another, “What did he just say?” scientists and physicians in search of cancer cures were cheering. “What we’re going to see is more and more cancers getting cured more and more often”.
Later this month, Biden said he’ll convene the first in a series of meeting on the issue with members of the president’s cabinet and the heads of all relevant agencies to discuss ways the federal government can participate.
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The NCI makes data from the sequencing of thousands of tumors available to all researchers, and there are other big data sharing efforts such as ASCO’s CancerLinQ rapid-learning system, but clinical research data is harder to come by, Varmus said.
