Fifty years ago last December, then US president Richard Nixon launched a “war on cancer”.
He maintained the time had come “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”, in an address to the US Congress.
This week, current president Joe Biden similarly invoked the spirit and ingenuity that had taken Americans to the lunar surface in the 1960s to achieve a long-term goal of curing cancers “once and for all”.
Biden acknowledged that Nixon’s cancer initiative had been a slow burner, and for the first quarter century deaths from the condition largely remained unchanged.
Research and investment started in 1971 did eventually begin to pay off, and over the following 25 years cancer death rate fell by more than a quarter.
However, Biden pointed out “despite the progress of life extended, lives saved, cancer is still the number two cause of death in United States second only to heart disease”.
Biden said overseeing this new Cancer Moonshot programme was one of the reasons why he ran for the presidency.
Biden had been tasked previously by president Barack Obama to spearhead a drive against cancer which led to new legislation, increased funding for research and the streamlining of health agencies.
However, he said when he got to the White House himself he was determined to “supercharge” the Cancer Moonshot programme, launched in 2016.
He has now set a new goal to cut cancer death rates by at least 50 per cent in the next 25 years and “to turn more cancers from death sentences into chronic diseases people can live with”.
The president’s cancer initiative was welcomed by the American Cancer Society, which said it would stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Biden on his plans.
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However, Republicans argued moves by the Democrat-controlled congress last month to introduce measures to lower prescription drug costs — what they described as “socialist price controls” — would lead to fewer cures being developed and jeopardise his cancer plan.
For the president, the fight against cancer is personal. His son Beau as well as his close friend senator Ted Kennedy died from the same form of brain cancer.
He said overseeing this new Cancer Moonshot programme was one of the reasons he ran for the presidency.
He promised to use the power of the White House to “increase funding, break logjams and to speed breakthroughs”.
Biden set out some of the failings in tackling cancer in the US: late diagnosis; lack of assistance to help patients navigate the cancer care system; inequalities based on race, gender and where people live, as well insufficient sharing of data and knowledge.
He promised to use the power of the White House to “increase funding, break logjams and to speed breakthroughs”.
He told cancer patients the type of developments that were being worked on by scientists.
These included “exploring whether mRNA vaccine technology that brought us safe and effective Covid-19 vaccines could be used to stop cancer cells when they first arise”.
Imagine getting a simple shot instead of a gruelling chemo or getting a pill from a local pharmacy instead of invasive treatments and long hospital stays
— Joe Biden
A cancer Cabinet will harness the knowledge and assets of difference parts of the US government — from space agency Nasa, with its data on radiation, to the mammoth computer calculation facilities available to the Department of Defence.
Biden wanted to establish a new agency to push for healthcare breakthroughs modelled on the success of a body known as DARPA — the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
Since the late 1950s this agency has played a key role in accelerating developments for the military — the fruits of some of which have spun out into the civilian world.
The president said the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) “will have the singular purpose to drive breakthroughs to prevent, detect, and treat diseases — including cancer, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, and other diseases”. It has an initial budget of about $1 billion.
The president wants ARPA-H to dream big. He urged people to imagine a world with vaccines against cancer, a simple blood test during an annual physical that could detect the condition early on as well as “molecular ZIP codes that could deliver drugs and gene therapy precisely to the right tissues”.
“Imagine getting a simple shot instead of a gruelling chemo or getting a pill from a local pharmacy instead of invasive treatments and long hospital stays.”
He stressed he wanted to see life-saving technologies invented in the US be manufactured there too.
He signed an executive order directing the federal government “to ensure biotechnologies invented in the United States of America are made in the United States of America”.
What that may mean for Ireland’s pharmaceutical sector in the years ahead remains to be seen.
