The Cancer Moonshot: Achieving Lift Off
On June 29, Vice President Biden will convene a first-of-its-kind summit focused on stimulating action and fostering collaborations around the goals of the National Cancer Moonshot — to make a decade’s worth of progress in preventing, diagnosing and treating cancer in just five years, and ultimately striving for a cure.
The National Cancer Moonshot Summit will provide a national venue for reaching Americans across the country and will bring together patient advocates, health care providers, biomedical researchers, technological innovators, industry leaders, and others to form collaborations in support of the Moonshot. You can learn more about this effort and how to be a part of the national conversation here.
When President Kennedy called to put a man on the moon, he put technology at the service of humanity. That is what the Cancer Moonshot is doing, too. This isn’t about technology development, computational power, or health care record management alone — it is about keeping people alive without the scourge of cancer as best we can through better use of technology, data, and human resources.
The Cancer Moonshot involves every sector of our society — government agencies that comprise the Cancer Moonshot Task Force, scientists and academics and private researchers that make up the Blue Ribbon Panel, philanthropists, patients, foundations, and the private sector — everyone has a role to play.
Setting out to double the pace of progress in cancer is no simple task.
For one thing, there’s the matter of “cancer” not being a single disease, but hundreds of diseases, with “cures” taking many forms. We know that reducing deaths from cancer starts with preventing it in the first place. It means improving our ability to find a cancer — and to quickly treat it. And it means making sure everybody has the opportunity to access quality care.
It’s a tall order, to be sure. But it’s one I’m confident we can fill once we break down silos and foster more collaboration. The summit’s goal is to do just that.
I wanted to give you a sense of how we’re thinking about the actual work behind the Moonshot.
First, we are calling all hands on deck.
Immediately after President Obama announced that he was putting Vice President Biden in charge of a new national mission to end cancer as we know it, he issued a Presidential Memorandum to marshal the full force of federal government — creating the Cancer Moonshot Task Force — to coordinate expertise across twenty agencies, sub-agencies and White House offices. This group is coming out with ideas and actions that can change the way the government uses its resources in the fight against cancer.
Here are a few examples:
The National Cancer Institute (NCI) is now working with pharmaceutical companies to expand the number of cancer drugs available for combination clinical trials. This will save time and money and hopefully lives.
The Food and Drug Administration is launching a new Oncology Center for Excellence, which is helping to streamline the review process for cancer products, particularly combination products.
A team of Presidential Innovation Fellows, assembled under the Cancer Moonshot, are working closely with patients and the NCI to re-design the way people can learn about and search for cancer clinical trials on the NCI website.
But the Federal government can’t do this alone. That’s why Vice President Biden is calling on all individuals and organizations with a part to play to help catalyze additional work in the private sector.
We want to focus as much as possible on collaboration, because that’s ultimately what will carry this work forward. (And by the way, if you want to step up and make a commitment yourself, you can do that here.)
We’re working to realign the incentives of the current research and care system to promote breakthrough progress.
Toward this end, in Fiscal Year 2017, the President has requested funds to launch an Exceptional Opportunities in Cancer Research Fund. This fund would support new ways of supporting high-risk, high-return research ideas that will spur the next generation of advances so desperately needed by patients around the world.
We’re creating a new way to generate, share, and integrate data to enhance patient care.
Under the Cancer Moonshot, we are working to apply 21st century technology to transform data that is voluntarily donated by patients in order to use the power of data to generate real solutions for treating cancer. For example, we’re working to use our national infrastructure within the Department of Energy’s National Laboratories to find new patterns in predicting which treatments work best for which patients.
We’re accelerating new prevention strategies, diagnostics, and therapies for patients in communities around the world.
We need to make sure any knowledge generated or treatment discovered actually makes it to the patient. This isn’t just about affordable access to the latest and greatest therapies, but also access to the best strategies for diagnosis and prevention.
Everybody needs to be on “let’s go” for this. When it comes to the National Cancer Moonshot, every American has a role to play. If there were ever a time that you wanted to raise your hand to change the world, now’s the time. There’s never been a better time. We have a vision, we have a leader in Vice President Biden, who will be devoted to this for the rest of his life. We have technology like we’ve never had before.
And we have you.
