Vice President Biden Delivers Cancer Moonshot Report, Announces Public and Private Sector Actions to Advance Cancer Moonshot Goals
Today in the Oval Office, Vice President Joe Biden delivered the Cancer Moonshot report to the President and the American public. The report summarizes the work of the Cancer Moonshot Task Force since its creation in January and lays out the Vice President’s strategic plan for transforming cancer research and care. The report also includes the Cancer Moonshot Blue Ribbon Panel’s identified areas of scientific opportunity.
Accompanying these findings and recommendations, today’s report includes the announcement of new commitments toward the goals of the Cancer Moonshot from both the public and private sectors. For example, the National Cancer Institute, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft are announcing a partnership to build a sustainable model for maintaining cancer genomic data in the cloud. The information stored there will be available to cancer researchers through the NCI’s Genomic Data Commons and Cancer Genomics Cloud programs.
The Department of Defense (DoD) is establishing a groundbreaking new study to transform our understanding of the biologic basis of cancer. Using the vast amount of data housed within DoD's cancer registry database and biologic sample collection, researchers will have at their fingertips potentially 250,000 samples to uncover new connections between the earliest signs of cancer. Findings can then be linked to information housed within the Environmental Protection Agency's databases to further accelerate our understanding of the environmental factors contributing to disease progression.
In addition, Lyft and Uber are expanding their support of affordable, reliable transportation for cancer patients. Currently, one-fourth of patients miss or reschedule their treatments and appointments because of transportation issues. Lyft has commited to expand its Boston-based Treatment Transport partnership to the more than 200 cities the company currently serves by 2020 so as to provide patients, particularly those from low-income communities, with credits to receive free transportation to and from treatments. Uber has set a goal to connect millions of patients with rides annually in over 500 cities by 2018.
The new actions and public-private partnerships announced today are just some of the over 70 commitments made this year as a result of the Cancer Moonshot. These commitments range from hundreds of millions of additional dollars toward research, to data-sharing partnerships to make it easier for doctors, researchers, and patients to access to the data that they need to make decisions about treatment, prevention, and research toward cures.
The Vice President and Dr. Jill Biden then addressed individuals representing the Federal and private sector cancer communities at the White House, including leaders in research, technology, philanthropy, advocacy, biopharma companies, and health-care delivery. Many of these individuals and organizations have contributed new efforts to advance progress toward Cancer Moonshot goals—to double the rate of progress in cancer prevention, diagnosis, and treatment, to do in 5 years what might otherwise take a decade.
For additional details, the full text of the Vice President’s Executive Report, the Cancer Moonshot Task Force Report, the Cancer Moonshot Fact Sheet, and the Cancer Moonshot Blue Ribbon Panel Report, visit medium.com/cancer-moonshot.
The content in this post has not been reviewed by the American Society of Clinical Oncology, Inc. (ASCO®) and does not necessarily reflect the ideas and opinions of ASCO®.
