What I said in March to the largest convening of cancer researchers in the country

By Dr. Jill Biden, Co-Chair, Biden Cancer Initiative

As delivered at the American Association of Cancer Research Annual Meeting, March 31, 2019, Atlanta, GA

Like a lot of you, I’ve seen cancer’s changing countenance again and again:

• In the thin hair tucked beneath my dear friend’s scarf during her breast cancer treatments.
• In the gaunt lines on my mother’s face during her chemotherapy.
• In the frail hand of my sister and the brave smile of my son, Beau.

But for its many faces and forms, some things are constant: The fear it inspires. The financial toxicity. The pain.

And cruelest of all, the time it steals: Days spent in treatment or recovering from surgery. Anniversaries and Birthdays. Long phone conversations and short summer nights. Pages and pages of our photo-albums unfilled.

“I wanted to come and hear their voices, hear what they had to say, and where they are going and what we have to look forward to about the future,” shared Dr. Jill Biden during her visit to Morehouse School of Medicine in April.

A few years ago I had to tell my class that I would miss the next session for personal reasons. My sister Jan was having an auto-stem cell transplant as a treatment for her lymphoma.

Now, my students have a lot of shining qualities, but boundaries are not one of them.

So, they immediately began shouting, “Dr. B, Dr. B, where’re you going?” I tried to explain with as much composure as I could muster, but standing there in front of them, the words caught in my throat. I turned and faced the whiteboard, hoping to hold back my emotions.

When I turned back around, the entire class was standing. They lined up and gave me a hug, one by one. It was a small kindness, but one I needed. And until that moment, I had no idea how much.

You can never tell what’s behind someone’s smile, or how much they may need your strength.

My students have shown me so many times that it’s not always about being the perfect person in the perfect position — it’s about showing up when you’re needed.

It’s about finding ways to use your talents in service of a mission — no matter what those talents are. And I have taken that lesson to heart.

Cancer has been a dark thread that has run throughout my life. It’s taken my friends, my parents. My beautiful son. After Beau died, there was a time when we didn’t know how to go on. Slowly, we remembered how to breathe again, and we knew we had to do something.

We were so proud when President Obama asked Joe to take mission control of the White House cancer moonshot. We were able to bring together more than a dozen government agencies around the urgency of this cause, and do things like fast-track review for cancer treatment-related patents and foster better data sharing with the Genomic Data Commons.

When the Administration ended, many of the leaders we worked with through the Moonshot kept coming up to us and saying the same thing: there are incredible organizations in this space…they are doing good, life-saving work… but there’s still a need for someone who can bridge the gaps between them.

So many people came up to us — survivors, family, and experts alike — they convinced us that we, uniquely, could convene, find collaborations, and bring people together.

Over the last few decades, we’ve seen an enormous effort to raise awareness and improve health care for cancer patients.

During her time at Morehouse School of Medicine, Dr. Biden hosted a conversation on cancer research and met future health leaders, being trained to lead the way in the fight against cancer.

Yet, as you all know, progress is uneven. Rural, Black, Latino, and Native American communities all see far less positive cancer outcomes. Poverty draws a line between surviving and succumbing to this disease.

It doesn’t have to be this way. We can put a stop to these disparities.

We can find better ways to treat and prevent this disease.

We can end cancer as we know it.

That is the guiding principle of our work at the Biden Cancer Initiative.

• We’re bridging the gaps in the cancer network.
• We’re working to provide resources, improved outcomes, and, just as importantly, offer hope.
• We’re working to provide resources, improved outcomes, and, just as importantly, offer hope.
• Last fall we formed the Biden Cancer Collaborative and convened a national summit with experts from across industries, non-profits, and the public sector. We held more than 450 community summits across the country.
• International organizations like WeWork, AirBnB, and Lyft made commitments to support this community in concrete ways.
• Companies and organizations announced 57 new actions and collaborations, including about a dozen in the area of research.

For example:

• The Lymphoma Research Foundation established the first research consortium of its kind to support AYA lymphoma science.
• The Legacy Program in Brain Cancer — a dedicated partnership between world-leading brain tumor experts and patients — launched a ten-year initiative with their first inaugural summit this past February.

Right now, we are at an inflection point…with advances in biology, engineering, and machine learning, new findings and treatments are discovered every year…science and medicine and our national-will are converging to create incredible progress in this fight.

Yet, so many of the best and brightest minds are still working in isolation.

We can learn something from every single medical interaction.

Every case, every patient has a lesson to teach us.

But so often those stories, that data, gets set aside or trapped behind needless walls of bureaucracy.

How can our community know what’s working if we’re not working together?

Now, sometimes things like collaboration and transparency get talked about like they are an easy or a simple solution. Putting data on the internet isn’t going to magically improve care and lower prices overnight.

And it’s certainly not going to be easy. But in the long term, it’s a pathway towards breaking through the remaining obstacles.

Science is truly a communal endeavor. It requires collaboration. It requires us to lean on each other and learn from each other.

And that’s why we must break down the barriers that are holding us all back and share the knowledge that already exists.

Dr. Jill Biden visiting Morehouse School of Medicine

Joe and I are honored to be a part of this community and to be able to contribute in small ways to this cause.

Still, we know our most important role is to help you do your job as best as you can. Because there’s no way we can win this without your research and innovation. But that’s not all.

We need your creativity, your connections, and your voice as well. We need everyone to speak up, to demand better resources, to believe that this is possible. We need your compassion and your kindness.

For a disease that has been with us since history was first recorded, we still have a long way to go.

Every day, we lose another mother, another friend, another son to this disease. But as I look out at this crowd, what I think about is how far we’ve come. All the things that have brought us to this pivotal moment in time.

The science, the great minds who have pushed us a little closer, the lives devoted to finding a cure.

And it reminded me of a poem by Alberto Rios. He wrote:

From those centuries we human beings bring with us

The simple solutions and songs,

The river bridges and star charts and song harmonies

All in service to a simple idea:

That we can make a house called tomorrow.

We — all of you — are the culmination of our history.

We carry a long legacy of the brilliant minds that have come before us. And when we bring those ideas, when we come together, we are powerful.

Together, we can build a home where cancer is a fear of the past. Where time is on our side. Where no family has to say goodbye too soon.