President Biden has been pledging to “cure” cancer for the past six years, beginning with his moonshot effort as vice president. He re-upped that pledge on the campaign trail, too, vowing again: “If I’m elected, we’re going to cure cancer.”
This time, though, Biden’s no longer promising a “cure.”
Instead, Biden will relaunch the White House Cancer Moonshot on Wednesday with an ambitious but noticeably more measured goal: Cutting the cancer death rate in half within 25 years. In substance and tone, the effort is modest when compared to 2016. Most notably, it doesn’t call for any new research funding — a key pillar of the Obama-era push.
Instead, the program will create a White House “Cancer Cabinet” geared toward expanding cancer screening and prevention, improving the experiences of cancer patients, survivors, and caregivers, and addressing racial disparities in cancer outcomes.
The effort represents Biden’s first attempt, as president, to tackle one of his signature issues. Since his son Beau Biden’s death in 2015 from glioblastoma, a form of brain tumor, cancer has been a deeply ingrained part of the president’s political identity.
But the Cancer Moonshot redux also illustrates the limitations of what the White House can do without a flood of new research money, and amid looming uncertainty about Biden’s ability to confirm new leaders for key federal research agencies. The president’s nominee to lead the Food and Drug Administration, the agency that oversees cancer clinical trials and the approval of new drugs, is stalled on Capitol Hill. The White House hasn’t announced a replacement for Francis Collins, the longtime director of the National Institutes of Health who stepped down in December.
Biden’s signature science proposal is languishing on Capitol Hill, too: The creation of ARPA-H, a new research agency that Biden has said could “end cancer as we know it.”
“There is great value in a president giving the populace hope that science can lead to cures,” said Jill O’Donnell-Tormey, the CEO of the Cancer Research Institute, a nonprofit focused on cancer immunotherapies. “But I would say without funding for a research component, you’re not going to get over the goalpost.”
While they welcomed the announcement, other cancer research advocates echoed calls for new research funding, and acknowledged that without progress on other fronts, the moonshot’s impact may be limited.
“We hope that today’s event at the White House will serve as a catalyst for the administration to appoint permanent leadership at the NIH, [National Cancer Institute], and FDA,” as well as provide funding boosts to those agencies, said Jon Retzlaff, the chief policy officer for the American Association for Cancer Research.
The new effort does contain a number of measures that the White House can pursue without help from Congress and without new funding, including a major personnel move: The appointment of Danielle Carnival as White House cancer coordinator.
Carnival, a neuroscientist who served as the original moonshot’s policy director, also worked as vice president of the Biden Cancer Initiative, the nonprofit Biden founded after leaving the White House in 2017, and later as CEO of the advocacy group I Am ALS, the driving force behind a $500 million research bill Congress passed late last year.
The new moonshot will also include a renewed call for Americans to receive cancer screenings. The White House estimated that approximately 9.5 million were missed thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic. It also will include efforts to expand HPV vaccinations, which help prevent cervical cancer, and the potential creation of diagnostics that can detect multiple cancers simultaneously, perhaps via an annual blood draw.
Perhaps most critically, it could once again galvanize the entire cancer research community, much like the 2016 effort and the more recent federal efforts surrounding Covid-19, said Elizabeth Jaffee, a physician and oncology professor at the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins who advised the original Cancer Moonshot and sat on the Biden Cancer Initiative’s board.
When the pandemic began, she said, “we needed an organized group of researchers and an organized government coming together, and in nine months, we had a vaccine.”
“I don’t think in nine months, we’re going to have a cure for cancer,” she said. “I’m just trying to make the analogy: There’s a lot out there, but you have to mobilize it.”
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.