In his last State of the Union address, President Barack Obama tasked Vice-President Joe Biden to head Cancer Moonshot, a national initiative aiming to double the rate of progress in cancer research — about a decade’s worth of breakthrough in five years — and ultimately put an end to the dreaded disease.
Cancer Moonshot 2020 was initially discussed by Biden — whole adult son and former Delaware Attorney General Beau Biden died of brain cancer back in early 2015 — with regulators and biopharmaceutical companies in December last year. The effort will steer randomized phase II trials forward, covering cancer patients at all stages in 20 tumor types.
With the goal to reach 20,000 patients in the next three years, the effort is hoped to inform phase III trials and the “aspirational moonshot” to produce vaccine-based immunotherapy to eradicate cancer by 2020.
But what makes Cancer Moonshot, which will receive $1 billion in funding from the Obama administration, a real game changer?
“[It] aims to … unite with others around research — the only way we’ll achieve a future beyond cancer,” wrote Breast Cancer Research Foundation (BCRF) chief mission officer Dr. Marc Hurlbert in a Huffington Post article.
Responding to Biden’s call to commit, cooperate and collaborate for the mission, the BCRF — the largest nonprofit breast cancer research funder in the U.S. — announced that it will double its annual research investment from $50 million to $100 million, shooting for a total $1 billion investment by 2021.
An area of focus for the nonprofit is to accelerate the understanding around what really causes cancer, mainly through “connecting the dots” lying between molecular knowledge on tumors and how that adds up to result in different types of cancer.
"Imagine if we all worked together ... shared the data behind breakthroughs so that the field as a whole can move forward faster and avoid unnecessary redundancy,” said the vice president before participants of an American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) meeting early this month.
Biden hit the “cult of the individual” in current cancer research practice, which he said does not offer recognition to team science. He also urged doctors to rethink the strategy of conducting clinical trials to allow them to find eligible subjects easily and for patients to actually find trials more fitting for their needs.
During the event, he announced the launch of a new open-access database called the Genomic Data Commons (GDC). Part of the National Cancer Institute, GDC features several clinical and genomic data collected from some 12,000 cancer patients, as well as detailed analyses of the molecular makeup of various cancer forms.
The database also contains information on treatments given to patients and their response to individual therapies.
