Mr. Vice President, I heartily applaud your engagement for cancer patients and for cancer research. As a leader and politician you will know how hard it is to change the course when everyone in the establishment wants to “stay the course”. But we must change course. Cancer research is in stagnation. We cannot stay the course and double-down on existing approaches that have an inherently limited efficacy (but are fashionable because of a few spectacular successes), and just engage in more clinical trials and more collaboration and more data sharing. Instead we need to overcome the current groupthink that prevents progress by promoting contrarian approaches. But how can we shake up things without being too disruptive?

The well-intended Cancer Moonshot initiative, I am afraid, is being hijacked by members of the establishment of cancer research who want to stay the course, THEIR course. Of course, there is honest desire to advance cancer research and to help patients among them -but only “my way or highway”. The Cancer Moonshot Summit last month (June 29, 2016) confirmed this mood: it was a festival of circular back patting among the members of the cancer research establishment. There was no talk about new scientific ideas on the nature of cancer that could push a breakthrough. But we need new bold ideas if we believe in a breakthrough. Current therapies do not work as desired. The major proposals for how to spend the big dollars to be allocated to cancer research were not bold but “same old — same old”. New ideas do not automatically come from just fostering collaborations and data-sharing.

Not that we should abandon immunotherapy and targeted therapy, or avoid collaboration and eschew data sharing, the major areas promoted in the Cancer Moonshot initiative. These are NOT the critical rate limiting factors to be addressed if we expect a breakthrough. We need new biological insights outside-the-box.

To shake up the establishment that stifles unorthodox ideas, I propose that the intended focus areas the Taskforce as identified be complemented by their very OPPOSITES. This is likely to sound backwards and unromantic and to anger some folks. But if we are talking a about a path towards a cure of cancer, all options should be on the table. No one is as good as the U.S. in promoting disruptive, bold new ideas.

So how do we complement the same old, same old? I propose the follwoing … — read more here…