In his last State of the Union address, U.S. President Barack Obama said he was determined to find a cure for cancer and that America must use its “spirit of innovation” to combat cancers’ challenges.
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While announcing the initiative, Obama said that as he’s gone to the mat for everybody, on a number of issues in the last forty years, he has made a decision to put Joe in charge of Mission Control.
Joe Biden’s son Beau, the Delaware Attorney General, died of brain cancer a year ago at age 46.
“Tonight, I’m announcing a new national effort to get it done”, Obama said.
“This is so personal for nearly every American and to millions of people in the world. We all know someone who has had cancer, or is fighting to beat it”.
Patrick Soon-Shiong, billionaire chairman and chief executive officer of NantHealth, formed this “unprecedented collaboration” to accelerate the development of immunotherapy as the standard of care for cancer patients, a press release stated.
On the speech the president did not specified exactly how he plans to run the mission, but Biden wrote on his verified Medium account that he wanted to increase both private and public resources to fight cancer.
And Thursday, during a teleconference with reporters to discuss President Obama’s State of the Union call for a stepped-up war on cancer, the National Cancer Institute’s acting director, Douglas R. Lowy, stressed that his agency is nearing completion on an effort of its own. On Good Morning America, Robin Roberts said that after 40 years, this could be Biden’s greatest legacy. “But I think anytime a president wants to leave a kind of lasting legacy, he really has to lay the foundation”, Catawba College Political Science Professor Michael Bitzer said.
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.
The Tallahassee chapter of the American Cancer Society will be rallying at the Florida capitol Thursday Jan. 21 at 9 a.m.to garner more funding from the legislature.
“I know we can”, insisted the vice president.
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The following week, he will head to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland – an annual get-together for billionaire investors and world-class scientists seeking funding. “He’s coming to Penn on the merits”, Fattah said.
