health day reporter
TUESDAY, Sept. 13, 2022 (HealthDay News) — President Joe Biden renewed his cancer initiative on Monday.
Speaking at the famous John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston, Biden compared JFK’s space race to his own efforts to reduce cancer rates by 50% over the next 25 years.
“He established a national purpose that could unite the American people and a common cause,” Biden said of Kennedy’s space effort.
“And I believe we can usher in the same reluctance to postpone, the same national purpose, which will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills to end cancer as we know it and even cure cancers. once and for all,” he added.
In his speech, Biden said the US National Cancer Institute (NCI) has launched a study that will examine the use of blood tests to screen for multiple cancers.
Danielle Carnival, the White House cancer relief coordinator, told the Associated press that the Biden administration sees enormous potential in such blood tests.
“One of the most promising technologies has been the development of blood tests that offer the promise of detecting multiple cancers in a single blood test and really imagining the impact this could have on our ability to detect cancer in a meaningful way. earlier and fairer,” Carnival said.
Carnival says it National Cancer Institute The study was designed so that any promising findings could be quickly translated into clinical practice while the longer study – which is expected to last up to a decade – continues. She said the aim was to find cancers through routine blood tests instead of invasive tests and biopsies.
The problem is personal for Biden, who lost his son Beau in 2015 to brain cancer. After Beau’s death, Congress passed the 21st Century Cures Act, which commits $1.8 billion over seven years to cancer research and was signed into law in 2016 by President Barack Obama.
Despite this, the cancer initiative does not have the same level of funding as the space program. Over $20 billion, or over $220 billion in 2022 dollars, has been poured into the Apollo space program, the PA reported.
While touting the cancer initiative on Monday, Biden announced that Dr. Renee Wegrzyn would become the first director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), which has been tasked with studying treatments and potential cures for cancers, Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes. and other diseases. Biden also announced a new NCI program that will fund young scientists studying treatments and cancer cureswith a focus on underrepresented groups.
Even without new breakthroughs, progress can be made in making cancer care more equitable, said Dr. Crystal Denlinger, scientific director of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network. PA.
But any effort to reduce the cancer death rate will have to focus on the biggest killer of cancer, which is lung cancer, the PA reported. Primarily attributable to smoking, lung cancer now causes more cancer deaths than any other cancer.
Lung cancer screening helps. The American Cancer Society says such screening has helped lower the cancer death rate by 32% from its peak between 1991 and 2019, the PA reported.
More information
Visit the US National Cancer Institute to learn more about the Cancer Moonshot program.
SOURCE: White House press release, September 12, 2022; Associated press