Take Public Health to the Moon With You, Joe Biden

Take Public Health to the Moon With You, Joe Biden, After Your Davos Forum

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Editor's Note: At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland Vice President Joseph Biden wrote an article regarding his new assignment (see below for the V.P's remarks and a video from the Davos panel on the topic). In part, he said:

"It's personal for me. But it's also personal for nearly every American, and millions of people around the world. We all know someone who has had cancer, or is fighting to beat it. They're our family, friends, and co-workers …

… And the goal of this initiative is simple — to double the rate of progress. To make a decade worth of advances in five years. Here's how we can do it:

Over the next year, I will lead a dedicated, combined effort by governments, private industry, researchers, physicians, patients, and philanthropies to target investment, coordinate across silos, and increase access to information for everyone in the cancer community.

Here’s what that means: The Federal government will do everything it possibly can — through funding, targeted incentives, and increased private-sector coordination — to support research and enable progress. We'll encourage leading cancer centers to reach unprecedented levels of cooperation, so we can learn more about this terrible disease and how to stop it in its tracks."

V.P. Biden's discussion in Davos with cancer experts such as NIH director Francis Collins and former UC Berkeley biologist and Nobel laureate Elizabeth Blackburn, now president of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, touched on many issues, including the promise of CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing to help find new ways to tackle cancer.

In his final State of the Union address, President Obama took a page from President Kennedy's book to make a bold assertion that — just as the United States made it to the moon in a decade — the US can cure cancer for good. "For the loved ones we've all lost, for the family we can still save, let's make America the country that cures cancer once and for all," said Obama on January 12, appointing Vice President Biden as head of Mission Control for the effort.

It's not the first time a president has called for a major cancer-fighting campaign from the State of the Union’s bully pulpit. In 1971, President Nixon launched what became known as the War on Cancer saying, "The time has come in America when the same kind of concentrated effort that split the atom and took man to the moon should be turned toward conquering this dread disease." Fictional presidents have made hay out of the 'moonshot' to end cancer, too, as fans of The West Wing will recall from an early draft of President Bartlet's 2002 State of the Union address.

Now, in 2016, many people believe that the time is right for another big push to defeat cancer. But according to Mailman School of Public Health scientists, a cancer moonshot will never get off the ground without public health. Since 1990, cancer mortality in the United States has dropped by a dramatic 23 percent, and research shows that prevention efforts like more and better screenings and public education around risk factors like smoking can take credit for much of that progress.

"We should be doubling down on prevention," says Alfred Neugut, Myron M. Studner Professor of Cancer Research and professor of Epidemiology. Yet for cancer, like most diseases, the bulk of federal research dollars are directed elsewhere. "Most funding goes into either basic science or into clinical therapeutics."

Less than 7 percent of the National Cancer Institute’s $4.9 billion budget for 2014 went to cancer prevention and control. Part of the problem is that successes in preventing cancer can take decades to see.

"Come 2040, there will be a major decline in cancer mortality thanks to smoking cessation and other public health efforts. That will be spectacular — we just haven't seen it yet,” says Neugut. "In heart disease you can see the effects of prevention faster: hypertension control, lipid control, and smoking cessation all have an effect within a couple of years. But in cancer, it can take 20, 30, 40 years to see the effects."

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Take Public Health to the Moon With You, Joe Biden, After Your Davos Forum

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