In his final State of the Union address this week, President Obama announced a new “moonshot” for cancer research.
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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. After touring the facility’s Center for Advanced Cellular Therapeutics, Biden sat down with doctors, researchers and academics to discuss recent advances.
The Obama administration has launched a “moonshot” initiative to cure cancer that will involve increasing resources – both private and public – to fight cancer and break down walls between disciplines in the oncology arena.
But is finding a cure for cancer realistic or merely rhetoric? “And we can cure the cancer by targeting the right genes”, said Schwartzberg, who has also been an oncologist for 30 years. At the cancer center Biden was visiting Friday, researchers are exploring what’s known as chimeric antigen receptor technology, in which a patient’s immune cells are engineered outside of their body to hunt for tumors, then infused back into the patient’s body.
“My grandpop used to say, “Joey, there’s three kinds of politics” ” – church politics, labor politics and regular politics, Biden recalled recently, before adding one of his own.
For the 14th year, runners and walkers are raised awareness and funds to benefit some of the most vulnerable patients – children who are cared for at St. Jude Children’s Hospital.
“What are the genes that get turned on or altered in cancer that we can target?”
There’s been striking progress in recent years even though cancer remains the nation’s No. 2 killer.
In 2013, the American Cancer Society estimated that cancer caused 580,350 deaths in the United States, including 28,680 in Pennsylvania.
“The science, data, and research results are trapped in silos, preventing faster progress and greater reach to patients”, Biden said. “Last year, vice-president Biden said that with a new moonshot, America can cure cancer”.
While one out of every four cancer deaths is because of lung cancer, the rate of new lung cancer cases has continued to decline as fewer people smoke.
Fattah serves as a senior Democrat on the House Appropriation Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education, which has funding jurisdiction for the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Look for newer ways to detect cancer early using so-called liquid biopsies, blood tests that capture fragments of DNA that tumors shed into the bloodstream.
Still, he says the more data they can share about those mutations – and other aspects of genetics, like cell proteins – the easier it’ll be to treat or even eradicate more types of cancer more quickly.
“We know the enemy now in a very detailed way”, Neel said.
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“Cancer is an important political cause because it is a mortal disease that we fear, but we fear it much less with the enormous successes we have seen since Richard Nixon’s time”.
