Vice President Joe Biden took his “moonshot’’ cancer initiative to the heady reaches of the World Economic Forum in Davos this week, bringing a brace of powerful weapons to the fight: decades of government service, a national bully pulpit, and searing personal experience with the disease that killed almost 600,000 Americans in 2015. In fact, by many accounts, the death of his 46-year-old son Beau, from brain cancer last year, prompted Biden to put aside his political goals to wage this battle: “I plan on doing this for the rest of my life,’’ he told reporters at one point.
At Davos, Biden announced that he has already met with three pharmaceutical companies and the head of the US Food and Drug Administration, and that the drug executives said they are “open to a different way of doing business’’ in order to ensure that promising new therapies get to patients quickly.
Certainly, with this high-profile start, there’s reason for optimism. But daunting barriers remain. More than 40 years after President Richard Nixon signed the National Cancer Act of 1971, billions of dollars have been devoted to research. While there have been some tantalizing success stories since then, cancer is a complex foe: Researchers acknowledge that they still don’t fully understand metastasis, and many tumors ultimately become resistant to the drugs used to treat them.
To make meaningful progress, Biden needs to break through some seemingly impenetrable silos and make cancer researchers downright uncomfortable, breast cancer advocate Fran Visco told Sharon Begley of STAT. In a genomic era, sharing data about tumors and clinical trial outcomes is essential. Biden should push private drug companies and nonprofit academic labs alike to make data readily available to others. Genetic studies of tumors, which are done at major cancer centers, are typically paid for by money that comes from philanthropists or from institutional budgets, Barrett Rollins, of Boston’s Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, told STAT. To deepen that pool of data — which will inevitably help scientists in their push to develop targeted therapies — insurers must step up. Biden has the clout to recommend early and often that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services begin reimbursing patients for genetic sequencing.
Presumably steeped in the folkways of Congress, after long service in the US Senate, Biden could prove to be a credible salesman for additional government funding for basic biomedical research — an important role in a Congress that seems increasingly hostile to science, period. The $4.9 billion budget for the National Cancer Institute, an important source of grant support for researchers conducting clinical trials, has been flat in recent years, once inflation is taken into account. And the cost of doing medical research, known as the Biomedical Research and Development Price Index, has been taking an ever-bigger bite out of funding, according to the Center for American Progress.
The term “moonshot,’’ which stems from the Kennedy Administration’s push for a space program that was robust enough to put US astronauts on the moon, might seem like a political cliché. At this moment, it’s actually just what is needed.
