President Biden on Wednesday relaunched the Cancer Moonshot program he started during the Obama administration, citing progress in treatments and care.
Mr. Biden said the goal of the White House-led effort will be to reduce the death rate from cancer by at least 50% over the next 25 years and improve the experience of cancer patients and survivors.
“Our message today is this: We can do this, I promise you we can do this,” Mr. Biden said in the White House East Room. “This is a presidential, White House priority — period.”
He said the fight against cancer is a truly bipartisan effort, improving the odds of meeting his goal.
The president and first lady Jill Biden also called on Americans to resume cancer screenings that were missed during the pandemic.
“We are living in a golden age of research and discovery,” Mrs. Biden said. “We can end this terror and all of us have a role to play.”
President Obama in 2016 asked Mr. Biden to lead a national effort to “end cancer as we know it.” The issue is deeply personal to Mr. Biden. His son, Beau, died of an aggressive form of brain cancer in 2015.
Mr. Biden said he is reviving the program during his presidency because there are new treatments that target specific mutations and immunotherapies that teach the body to target and kill cancer cells. He also cited better scans and other screening tools.
Congress in late 2016 provided $1.8 billion for the moonshot program over seven years, so there is $400 million in funding authorized for 2022 and 2023.
Mr. Biden will address the cancer campaign in remarks from the White House East Room on Wednesday.
The American Cancer Society estimates there will be 1.9 million new cancer cases diagnosed and 609,360 cancer deaths in the U.S. this year, with lung and bronchus cancers topping the list with an estimated 130,000 deaths.
Mr. Biden is pushing to save about 300,000 lives per year and thinks it is doable because the cancer death rate dropped about 25% over the past two decades, sitting at 146 per 100,000 people from nearly 200 in 2000, according to The Associated Press.
The federal government has pointed to advancements in screening and treatments for the progress, alongside a dramatic reduction in smoking.
The National Institutes of Health said a promising technology linked to the COVID-19 fight — messenger-RNA — might help in the push to beat back cancer.
Scientists have been testing treatment vaccines with mRNA, which carries instructions that help the body’s immune system identify and attack harmful agents, for nearly a decade, and with some promising early results.
“In fact, scientists at both Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna drew on their experience developing mRNA cancer vaccines to create their coronavirus vaccines. Now, some investigators believe the success of the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines could help accelerate clinical research on mRNA vaccines to treat cancer,” the NIH said in a January blog post.
The NIH said dozens of clinical trials are testing mRNA treatment vaccines against various types of cancer, including pancreatic cancer, colorectal cancer, and melanoma.
So far, the Food and Drug Administration has not approved any mRNA cancer vaccines.
• Tom Howell Jr. can be reached at thowell@washingtontimes.com.
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