Vice President Joe Biden as leader of the new National Cancer Moonshot Initiative a $1 billion project, is hopeful that cancer well be eliminated as we know it. The Vice President speaking at the Health DataPalooza Meeting held in Washington D.C., in May said “The battle has just begun and we all need to join and work together to aggressively fight cancer”.
An important part of the formula to successfully fight the disease is the use of “Big Data” to enable the understanding of cancer and the specialized treatments needed.
The National Cancer Moonshot Initiative will work to break down barriers to progress by enhancing data access and at the same time, develop collaborations with researchers, doctors, philanthropies, patients, patient advocates, along with biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies.
As the Vice President’s son was fighting the disease, it was very difficult to even get hospitals to share information but in the future with new computing power, it will be possible to use big data to:
- Develop, evaluate, and optimize safe cancer vaccines to target unique features of individual cancers
- Further develop genomic and proteomic technologies to greatly increase methods to detect markers of cancer
- Extend the early successes of immunotherapy for cancer treatment to virtually all solid tumors by harnessing the power of the body’s immune system
- Provide a greater understanding of the genetic changes that occur within the cancer cell and in surrounding and immune cells
- Share data that will break down barriers between institutions and researchers, so that a network centered on the patient can be made available
- Establish an “Oncology Center of Excellence” to incorporate the combined skills of regulatory scientists and reviewers experienced in drugs, biologics, and devices
The Vice President’s hope is that the cancer initiative by enhancing data access, will bring about a decade’s worth of advances in just five years. These advances should make it possible to detect cancer at a very early stage, make more therapies available to more patients, and improve our ability to prevent cancer.
In April 2016, the National Cancer Institute announced a Blue Ribbon Panel to help guide VP Biden’s Moonshot Initiative. The panel represents a spectrum of scientific areas including biology, immunology, genomics, diagnostics, bioinformatics, and cancer prevention and treatment.
Members include investigators with expertise in clinical trials and cancer health disparities. In addition, members of cancer advocacy groups and pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, plus patient advocates.
Go to www.cancer.gov/research/key-initiatives/moonshot-cancer-initiative for more information on the National Cancer Moonshot Initiative.