Vice President Joe Biden’s report on the “Cancer Moonshot Initiative” discusses in detail the important progress made in a short time by the Federal agencies and the private sector to fight the cancer battle. In the past several months, more than 70 public and private sector commitments have been made to join the fight against cancer.
For example, the Federal government has been forging ahead on specific projects. NIH www.nih.gov launched a new partnership to bring together drug companies, major cancer research centers, foundations, and philanthropies to collaborate on early stage research.
The National Cancer Institute (NCI) www.cancer.gov has launched a new public-private partnership with 20 to 30 pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies to allow researchers to more easily license and test their existing drugs for new combinations that could possibly be effective against different types of cancer. Trials using combination therapies can now be streamlined to move more quickly.
The NCI has also adopted a new dashboard to make it easier for patients and doctors to search for clinical trials. The dashboard was created to maximize the user experience that the medical community can go to for information http://trials.cancer.gov.
As been previously announced the U.S Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) www.uspto.gov has launched a free and accelerated pilot program aimed at cutting in half the time it takes to review patent applications in select fields regarding cancer therapy.
FDA has created an Oncology Center of Excellence (OCE) to maximize the availability of oncology expertise and to review cancer-related applications. The OCE will unite cancer product regulatory reviews across FDA centers to accelerate and bring new safe therapies to market.
In the area of cancer prevention, CDC www.cdc.gov is promoting cancer vaccines as a safe and effective strategy to use to combat various types of cancers. The objective is to increase HPV vaccination rates by raising awareness about how important is to vaccinate males and females ages 11-12.
One of the important factors related to finding cures for cancer involves the use of 21st century technology. The VA www.va.gov and the Department of Energy http://energy.gov have partnered to apply the most powerful computational assets at DOE’s National Labs.
The use of the most powerful technology at DOE will be used to cover half a million veterans’ records from the VA’s Million Veteran Program www.research.va.gov/mvp which is a cornerstone of the Precision Medicine Initiative www.cancer.gov/research/key-initiatives/moonshot-cancer-initiative.