In his final State of the Union address Tuesday, President Obama pledged to make America the nation that cures cancer, and turned to Vice President Joe Biden to lead the charge.
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“I don’t want the press or folks out there saying, ‘Biden is being naive and saying we’re about to cure all cancer, and we’re going to do it tomorrow, ‘ ” Biden said. When he announced in October that he would not run for president, he called for a “moonshot in this country to cure cancer”. At the same time, he said, community oncologists, who treat more than 75% of cancer patients, have more limited access to cutting-edge research and advances.
In addition to his work to increase cancer research funding, Fattah has been the key champion in Congress for strengthening our understanding of the human brain and investing federal dollars towards neuroscience research as a means to find cures and treatment for brain disease and disorders, including brain cancer. “Vice President Biden’s new initiative will use the resources already available to us to better coordinate and streamline our current efforts against cancer, while infusing new funding and adding more partners to this fight”, Fattah added.
Then again, there was that cancer “moonshot” thing.
“This recognizes what many people in our field have been sensing over the past few years”, said Dr William Nelson, the director of the Johns Hopkins Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center.
On the Labor-HHS Subcommittee, Fattah has worked with his colleagues on both sides of the aisle to increase medical research support, including funding for cancer research at the National Cancer Institute.
Is one fix for all types of cancer possible?
“We are making progress with a much more rapid rate than ever, especially compared to my early days in the field”, Varmus said.
In a statement released after the speech, Biden mentioned that he will encourage collaboration as a key initiative to share the research that is “trapped in silos, preventing faster progress and greater reach to patients”. “What we’re going to see is more and more cancers getting cured more and more often”.
In 2016, experts predict there still will be 1,685,210 new cancer cases and 595,690 deaths from cancer in the United States, and that’s expected to rise to 2.3 million cases per year by 2030.
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.
The NCI portal, which was announced in December 2014, will open with two big data sets containing information from the Therapeutically Applicable Research to Generate Effective Treatments (TARGET) program and the Cancer Genome Atlas.
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“We have also done some genetic testing and this testing shows I have some markers which may help in the treatment”, the pancreatic cancer patient told FOX13.
