What I said in March about the Progress Against Cancer

By Vice President Joe Biden, Co-Chair, Biden Cancer Initiative

As delivered at WeWork Cancer Collaboration Hub event on March 26, 2019, New York, NY

Over the last three years — I’ve traveled the country and the world visiting patients and doctors in cancer centers and hospitals, speaking before tens of thousands of researchers, clinicians, patients, technologists, and talking with hundreds of advocates to learn what is most needed in this fight — how to double the rate of progress and bring new answers and real hope to patients and their families.

Above all else, I have learned that there was reason for hope.

But only if we solve the issues that stand in the way of patient access to information and care and improved patient outcomes. From what I learned, there is so much opportunity to make things work better for patients.

• We should be able to say that the affordability of cancer treatments is getting better not worse — but we can’t.
• We should be able to say there is widespread sharing of research data and that medical records are easier and cheaper to get in a way that patients can share them for research — but we can’t.
• We should be able to say that your doctor in Missoula, Montana has all the tools needed to treat whichever cancer you may have just as the doctors at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center here in New York or Huntsman Cancer Institute do — but we can’t.
• We should be able to say that patients are provided nurse navigators who talk them and their caregivers through treatment options, through financial conversations, and help them find their way through the complicated maze that is our healthcare system — but we can’t.

In each of these problem areas — and others — there are reasons grounded in tradition, in culture, in history, and in personal advancement that may have once been valid but certainly are not any longer — and they strongly resist change.

But we will change them.

We must change them.

We need new voices and new ideas –like from all of you — not just from the research laboratories at the great institutions, but from every community and every sector, from the tech disruptor to the community organizer and everything in between.

This is how we take on this fight anew.

Today at the Biden Cancer Initiative, we are focused on solving major systematic issues in how we deal with cancer research and care.

Another way of putting what we are trying to do is this — we are trying to create the cancer research enterprise and healthcare system that people think we already have.

We have launched swat teams — working groups of experts from our Advisory Committee — to attack the problems of data sharing and data standards, to improve clinical trials and the pediatric treatment development pipeline, to implement broader patient navigation, and to increase effective prevention and access to treatments and care.

We believe that we can make progress in these areas because of the incredible response we have seen thus far.

Over the last three years, Jill and I put out the call for new actions to make a decade of progress in five years — and in so many ways, organizations, companies, and individuals have stepped up and contributed to solutions we have identified in areas of cancer research and care — in numbers and with an enthusiasm that we could not have expected.

For example:

• One of the key issues we talk about is how to share the knowledge from major cancer centers to improve outcomes for the majority of patients who are treated in communities beyond their reach. Project Echo has found a way to address this — by using a simple but incredibly impactful solution. They use teleconferencing to connect oncology experts directly with docs in community practices to provide training — moving knowledge rather than patients. Now they are adding 50 ECHO programs to reach 3 million patients by 2025.
• Airbnb launched its Open Homes Medical Stays program –allowing Airbnb hosts to open their homes for free to people traveling for medical treatment. In just the past six months, roughly 2,000 people made use of this program. But that’s not enough — and today day Airbnb is announcing that they will provide $1.2 million in grants to work with organizations who can let more patients know about this opportunity — to bring this program to more patients — the New York-based Bone Marrow Foundation and the Cancer Support Community.
• WeWork joined the fight as well, by creating Collaboration Hubs — dedicated space for individuals working in the cancer community to come together, share their work, and advance their progress. Since November, more than 400 people have activated these spaces in several cities across the country with many more events planned in the coming months.

People feel it, they feel the movement to make progress, they feel the urgency of now, and it gives them hope, real hope.

Whether you call it the Cancer Moonshot or the Biden Cancer Initiative or the community coming together to improve outcomes, the idea is the same — to double our rate of progress in preventing, detecting, diagnosing, treating, and surviving cancer.

We have found that thousands of organizations and even millions of people want to work together to end cancer as we know it. All together what we have found is that the Biden Cancer Initiative is an opportunity, a reason and in some cases, an excuse, for people to come together, to change systems and practices that have resisted change for decades.

We have come a long way in just three years, but we can’t claim victory until the solutions we are developing are the standard, not the exception, and until we have changed the things we cannot accept.

• We cannot accept disparities in outcomes by race, gender and zip code.
• We cannot accept un-affordable treatments
• We cannot accept efforts to roll back the opportunity for all Americans to have affordable, meaningful health insurance.
• We cannot accept business as usual practices in research and care when there is nothing “usual” about a cancer diagnosis.

So, we have taken on these challenges and so much more.

We do this as a united community. Because it is going to take all of us to deliver on the hope of millions of patients around the world.

Together we can continue to make progress — together, we can make hope real.