And the war against cancer rages on. In President Barack Obama’s 2016 State of the Union Address, he endorsed Vice President Joe Biden’s “moonshot” plan to cure cancer. Biden first announced his plan in October 2015, telling Americans he was “pushing as hard as [he could] to accomplish [it].” Coming at a tender time after Biden had recently lost his son Beau to brain cancer, this plan was fueled by high emotions and expectations.
Although it has gained a lot of momentum in the last few decades, this so-called war is nothing new. In his 1971 State of the Union Address, President Richard Nixon declared that “the time [had] come in America when the same kind of concentrated effort that split the atom and took man to the moon should be turned toward conquering this dread disease.” But 45 years later, we’re still struggling to do this. Lenny Bernstein, a Washington Post writer, predicts that this war will “be more like a swarm of fighter jets scrambling to take on numerous adversaries in an ever-changing battle.”
Biden’s strategy for eradicating cancer focuses on collaboration among all necessary moving parts — government, industry, researchers, patient groups and philanthropies — to create well-oiled, cancer-combat fighter jets. He also wants to do this fast, and “make a decade worth of advances in five years.”
Although this sounds like a great idea, people are questioning if it’s actually possible. Political leaders have talked about “ending cancer” ever since Nixon was president. But as more research is being done on the disease, this seems increasingly impossible. Jose Baselga, president of the American Association for Cancer Research and chief medical officer at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, said it best when he told The Washington Post, “A single approach to cancer … ain’t going to happen.”
Scientists now use cancer as a general term to describe more than 100 different diseases. This means that Biden’s plan is less of a moonshot and more of a moon journey, the two main focuses of which are the aggregation of a large database of diagnostic information and a surge in research funding. This funding would primarily come in the form of a $260.5 million increase in the National Cancer Institute’s budget.
The first bit of progress made since this plan’s reveal could be seen at the JP Morgan Healthcare conference last week. Nine thousand of the biotech industry’s brightest investors gathered in San Francisco for their largest event of the year. On the business side of the conference, CEOs vehemently defended pricing policies in the drug industry. On the science side, however, there was a lot to be excited about.
This conference unveiled huge advances in technology side of this war. One of the most talked-about points involved the genetic technology manufacturing company Illumina and its brand new company, Grail. Grail will work to refine current technology used to detect cancer in the bloodstream. This could be a revolutionary new tool used to detect cancer.
The main basis of Biden’s plan, however, involves immunotherapy — a type of treatment that enlists the body’s own immune system to this war. Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News reported that the National Immunotherapy Coalition plans to “design, initiate and complete randomized clinical trials in patients with cancer at all stages of disease in up to 20 tumor types in as many as 20,000 patients by 2020.” Pretty amazing.
