“THE ONLY BIPARTISAN THING
endeavor as a nonpro t venture. e venture is being directed by Gregory C. Simon, the former executive director of the Moonshot Task Force, who previously served as Vice President Al Gore’s Chief Domestic Policy Advisor and as a senior vice president at P zer, the pharmaceutical conglomerate. Of note, Simon is also a cancer survivor himself—having successfully defeated a diagnosis of chronic lymphocytic leukemia. In a phone interview, Simon outlined the two underlying goals of the Initiative: to foster a sense of urgency behind the war on cancer and to generate more e ective strategies for the ght. “We are not a funding organization,” explained Simon. “Our focus is on being a catalyst for change.” Simon sees the environment now as fundamentally di erent from what Nixon faced in 1971. “As Vice President Biden says,” he observed, “When President Nixon declared war on cancer, he had no weapons. He had no army of researchers trained in oncology. He had no winning strategy.” But forty-six years later, many aspects of the e ort are being conducted using the same antiquated methods that had been state-of-the-art in the early 1970s. “We still do things by hand in an automated world,” Simon explained. “If any other business operated the way [the anti-cancer e ort does], they wouldn’t be competitive in the market.” information make no sense. Similarly, access to clinical trials is o en illogically limited by demographic and geographic factors. Large swaths of the country, both rural areas and some urban centers, are what Simon calls the equivalent of “food deserts” for medical research. Simon foresees a world where patients receive care where they live, rather than having to travel great distances to enroll in drug trials. He also anticipates improved access to information, so patients can more easily make educated choices about treatment alternatives, and measures that will make medications more a ordable. Earlier this year, at the Davos Economic Forum in Switzerland, Vice President Biden made an even more hopeful prediction: “I see the day when those younger people of you in this room, when you take your children and grandchildren later for their school physical, that they will—at the time they get their vaccination against measles and mumps, they’ll be vaccinated against certain types of cancer.” It is only fair to note that Vice President Biden’s approach to confronting cancer has been met with tempered criticism in some circles. Cancer researcher Vinay Prasad of Oregon Health and Science University, co-author Ending Medical Reversal: Improving Outcomes, Saving Lives , wrote in the Washington Post that the best way to cure cancer is to fund science across the board, rather than targeting cancer speci cally. He explained that “a serious moonshot would require funding science broadly, consistently and in steadily increasing amounts. is money would go to e core of the Biden Cancer Initiative’s mission is facilitating modernization and collaboration in both research and the delivery of care. One crucial aspect of this e ort is the free exchange of data. “To get funding, researchers [o en have to] keep their data behind proprietary walls,” lamented Simon. “ e raw data can be locked up behind a wall for a year.” From the perspective of patient welfare, those barriers to exchanging
LEFT IN AMERICA
IS THE FIGHT
AGAINST CANCER ,” BIDEN TOLD AUDIENCES AT THE SXSW FESTIVAL IN 2017.
cancer biology research, but also to physiology, molecular biology, genetics, physics, chemistry, social science, clinical trials, supportive care and on and on.” Science is incremental, according to Prasad, and it is impossible to predict the origins of the next breakthrough. Similarly, Gina Kolata and Gardiner Harris, writing in the New York Times , observed that “the chances of reaching a moment of victory as
the analogy ‘moonshot’ suggests seem entirely unrealistic.” But the Vice President remains optimistic. He told the assemblage at Davos that “the collaboration between cancer centers, drug companies, the insurance industry, and government is where the solution lies—and how we’ll end cancer as we know it.” e di erence between Biden and his critics may not be whether a Moonshot is achievable, but rather what is meant by a Moonshot. “We won’t have one turning point in the war on cancer,” explained Simon. “We’ll have many.” Or, as the Vice President explains it, the mission is to “double the rate of progress” and accomplish “a decade’s worth of advances in ve years instead of ten.” e Initiative, which was formally launched at the end of June, stands in the very early stages of a long mission. Simon concluded our phone conversation by emphasizing that everyone has a part to play in the war on cancer. We can all be foot soldiers, so to speak: ensuring friends and family members engage in preventive screening, for instance, or advocating at the grassroots level. “We [at the Biden Cancer Initiative] don’t own this,” emphasized Simon. “ e American people have turned this into a movement.” For more information about the Biden Cancer Initiative: bidencancer.org --- Jacob M. Appel is a psychiatrist and attorney in New York City . His thirteenth book, Millard Salter’s Last Day, is due out in November 2017. *
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