Joe Biden
Vice President Joe Biden speaks at the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate, Wednesday, Oct. 19, 2016 in Boston, about the White House's cancer "moonshot" initiative -- a push to throw everything at finding a cure within five years. (AP Photo/Elise Amendola)
(Elise Amendola)
BOSTON -- For Vice President Joe Biden, the fight against cancer is personal.
His son Beau Biden died of brain cancer last year at 46.
"You go out and try to learn as much as you possibly can when someone you adore and love is in trouble," Biden said Wednesday. "We strived, and learned as much as we could."
"What we learned from the best nurses, physicians and researchers was even if we couldn't save our son, science, medicine and technology were progressing ... and there was possibility for countless others of our daughters and sons," Biden said.
Biden spoke at the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate in Boston about the administration's Cancer Moonshot Initiative, which he leads -- a national effort to double the rate of progress in cancer research and treatment.
Massachusetts is home to some of the country's top hospitals and cancer centers, and Biden spoke to an audience that included doctors and researchers.
Biden sounded a mostly hopeful note, talking about the progress that has been made so far and next steps that must be taken.
Although President Richard Nixon declared war on cancer in 1971, Biden said a lot more progress has been made in recent years. Supercomputing, for example, enables researchers to aggregate huge amounts of data about cancer patients, which previously would have been impossible.
"The culture of medicine was very different (in 1971)," Biden said. "The idea of sharing data, there was no data to share."
Biden cited advances that have been made in areas like immunotherapy, using a patient's immune system to attack cancer cells.
"At its core, the moonshot is about two things," Biden said. "One is injecting the urgency of now into everything we do. And two is changing the system and culture of medicine that existed in 1971 to accommodate the immense opportunity that exists in 2016 in order to be able to win this fight."
Biden earlier this week released a report on the Moonshot efforts. Accomplishments include developing new technology to share data among agencies and researchers, making efforts to reduce the use of the carcinogen radon in construction, and launching an easy-to-use website to tell people about the availability of clinical trials near where they live.
Part of Biden's effort has been creating public-private partnerships to accelerate research and development of cancer-related technologies.
For example, Biden spoke about launching a partnership between the University of Chicago and the National Cancer Institute, where the institute gave the university access to all its data about cancer genome sequencing in exchange for the university making the data public to any researcher who wants it.
The government helped negotiate pre-licensing agreements with drug companies to make certain drugs available to researchers working on the impacts of different drugs taken in combination. And recently, Microsoft and Amazon agreed to partner with the National Cancer Institute to use cloud computing powers to store genomic information for easy access by researchers.
Biden has also been working within government to break down barriers to research and collaboration. He talked about trying to simplify processes at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration so cancer therapies can be approved more quickly.
Going forward, Biden said more needs to be done to prevent cancer -- for example, by ensuring that disadvantaged populations are better able to access existing technology to detect breast or lung cancer.
Biden said he hopes new technology will also result in significant advances, such as a noninvasive blood test being developed to identify certain markers of cancer.
The vice president said he is confident that "we're on the cusp of enormous progress."
Biden did not directly address the current presidential election, but he said he is bothered by the loss of the attitude from decades ago "that there wasn't anything we couldn't do if we set our mind to it."
"Today, we're talking about woe is me, what can we do, how can we get our arms around our problems," Biden said.
Biden said if the Moonshot initiative is successful in discovering new cures for cancer, "it's going to reinforce the minds of the American people that we can do anything."
Biden quipped that, in a way, his Moonshot is harder than the late President John F. Kennedy's goal of reaching the moon through space travel. "There was only one moon," Biden said. "There are 200 distinct cancers."