“President Joe Biden said today he plans to reignite the Cancer Moonshot initiative to accelerate progress in combating cancer.”
“Biden initially launched the Cancer Moonshot in 2016 as vice president after his son Beau Biden died of brain cancer in 2015. Congress provided $1.8 billion in funding for the Cancer Moonshot over seven years through the 21st Century Cures Act that same year. Upon its launch, the initiative set for the goals of accelerating scientific discovery in cancer, foster greater collaboration and improve data-sharing.”
“Now as president, Biden has set new goals through the Cancer Moonshot, including the reduction in the death rate from cancer by at least 50% over the next 25 years, improvements in the experiences of people living with and surviving cancer and — more ambitiously — the ‘end cancer as we know it today.'”
“Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the National Cancer Institute has noted a decrease in national routine cancer screenings. With these findings, Biden established a call to action for Americans to get routine screenings, while making them more available and accessible…”
“Biden called on Congress to fund and form his Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, or ARPA-H, modeled after DOD’s advanced projects agency, DARPA, to enable long-term research advancements in cancer and other medical conditions.”
“’This will be a new kind of entity within the National Institutes of Health, the NIH, with autonomy and authorities to drive unprecedented progress in biomedicine,’ Biden said. ‘ARPA-H will have a singular purpose to drive breakthroughs to prevent, detect and treat diseases including cancer, Alzheimer’s and diabetes and other diseases.'”
“Underpinning many of these efforts will be new ways to share data. Biden noted that medical data is still greatly siloed and that transferring health records still remains a challenge. He argued that cancer research can move forward faster with stronger data-sharing practices and infrastructure…” Read the full article here.
Source: Biden to Make Cancer Research a Priority in Reignited Cancer Moonshot Program – By Melissa Harris, February 2, 2022. GovCIO.
