“We are completely thrilled that President Obama has appointed Vice President Biden to spearhead a new thrust in cancer in our lifetime”, Dr. Willman said. It’s also an assignment that he asked for: In announcing late past year that he would not run for president, Biden called for a “moonshot” to find a cure for cancer, alluding to President John F. Kennedy’s call to put a man on the moon.
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Joe Biden’s son Beau, the Delaware Attorney General, died of brain cancer previous year at age 46.
“Last year, Vice President Biden said that with a new moonshot, America can cure cancer”, Obama said Tuesday.
The nationally known research institute has already been talking to Biden’s office about ways to realize the vision – and hopes to be a leader in the effort, executive vice president and center director Thomas Sellers said Wednesday.
In his comments on Tuesday night, Biden said his priority will be increasing public and private funds to fight cancer. It’s the largest killer in the world, and we are so close, so incredibly close, on finding cures and fundamental changes and making it a chronic disease in many cases and not a death sentence.
“It’s personal for me”, said Biden in a post on Medium. Next week he plans to meet with worldwide experts at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland and later this month he will convene the first of several meetings with cabinet secretaries and heads of agencies to discuss federal investment in cancer research. That increase also included an additional $264 million earmarked for the National Cancer Institute, due in part to the vice president’s efforts. Promising research is under way to employ the body’s immune system to attack cancer cells.
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.
Obama, in the last State of the Union address of his presidency, said America must use its spirit of innovation to help tackle the challenge of cancer. Those measures could include simply calling attention to recent advances in cancer research and encouraging Medicare, Medicaid and private insurers to cover genetic testing both in clinical trials and clinical care, he told Bloomberg BNA Jan. 13.
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Hours before the president’s announcement, a coalition of drugmakers and insurers announced the formation of the Cancer MoonShot 2020, a group with the goal of speeding the development of new approaches to treating cancer.
