President Barack Obama announced at Tuesday’s State of the Union address that Biden will be leading a “national effort” to “make America the country that cures cancer once and for all”.
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His son Beau had died of brain cancer earlier in 2015. “If Joe Biden is up for it, I hope he has support to move forward with research”. Biden is promising to work with biopharma in the process, putting up federal funds in a 5-year effort to hit the gas on oncology research worldwide. “There are a lot of interesting things happening in cancer research now that are really going to make a difference for patients and their families”. “In my world, “cure” is a four letter word, but we are going to cure some people”, Dr. Brawley said, adding that it is likely impossible to find a single cure to fix at least 200 types of cancer around. But he hopes the Biden moonshot will help persuade Congress to build on the 6.6% raise it gave to NIH this year, its largest boost in 12 years, and continue steady increases for the agency.
This is why the cancer community is willing, it is able, and it is more than ready to run this last mile in mankind’s long journey against a cunning killer. He was 46 and had undergone testing and treatments at MD Anderson.
But the ultimate task of the “moon shot” is not simply to better understand cancer and to develop treatments, it is to make those treatments accessible. So tonight, I’m announcing a new national effort to get it done. Technological advances could be key in that area. “It will launch a new effort to conquer a disease that has touched the life of almost every American, including me, by seeking a cure for cancer in our time”. What’s in the way right now of us not getting to a cure?
The bold declaration was welcome news to Tampa’s Moffitt Cancer Center. Biden plans to involve both the public and the private sector in this quest and hopefully those plans also include some of the breakthrough technology coming out of Silicon Valley. Data collection and sharing should be easier and more productive.
“We have tremendous difficulty collecting patient data because of privacy laws or the perception that privacy laws are preventing them from doing so”, Brawley said. Because American pharmaceutical companies profit from cancer drugs, critics have theorized that the health care industry doesn’t truly want a solution, while others insist that searching for a blanket cure might be unrealistic because of the scope of the sickness.
In the show, the president is talked out of actually making that pledge. “You have to start someplace”, he said. The nation has tried before to eliminate cancer.
The vice president also recognizes that it will take an global scientific army to eventually defeat cancer. Still, the disease is now the second most common cause of death in the United States.
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When Vice President Joe Biden declared that he would not be a candidate for the 2016 presidential race, he proclaimed that would focus his attention on a bigger goal: curing cancer. The act, which has passed the House and is now before the Senate, has similar aims of improving collaboration among researchers and modernizing clinical trials.
