Biden honored for cancer efforts

More than four decades after then-President Richard Nixon effectively declared war on cancer, Vice President Joe Biden criticized cancer research "silos" for spending more time studying cancer than fighting it. "Instead of being soldiers in the war against cancer, we've been students studying cancer," Biden told an audience of nearly 300 people at an awards ceremony of the World Affairs Council of Philadelphia.

Biden attended the Wednesday night event, held at the Hyatt at The Bellevue, to accept the educational nonprofit organization's Atlas Award for his leadership in accelerating and coordinating research toward curing cancer. In his nearly hour-long speech that veered from a straight acceptance speech to an urgent call for action, the vice president imagined a day when cancer vaccines are as routine as those for measles and mumps. He stopped short of declaring that a cancer cure was within immediate reach, but noted that exponential progress is possible in treating most forms of cancer if the research establishment fundamentally changes its practices.

Photo: KYLE GRANTHAM/THE NEWS JOURNAL

Margie Fishman

Under Biden's stewardship, the National Cancer Moonshot aims to double the speed of research efforts by increasing collaboration among doctors, researchers, philanthropists, pharmaceutical companies, patients and anyone else touched by cancer. The endgame is to boost the number of therapies available and improve prevention and detection of a disease that kills an estimated 600,000 Americans each year. The Obama administration has requested $1 billion to fund the effort, which has defined Biden's final year in office. This summer, Biden helped organize Cancer Moonshot summits in more than 260 communities nationwide, including at Christiana Care Health System. Roughly 2,000 Delawareans are expected to die from cancer this year.

Before his eldest son, the late Attorney General Beau Biden, was diagnosed with brain cancer, the vice president said he had no idea of the fragmentation impairing the cancer research community. Sharing Beau Biden's MRI results among the multiple institutions coordinating his treatment, Biden recalled, involved taking cell phone pictures and flying a disk of images to the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. At times Wednesday, Biden's voice rose in anger as he described "information hoarders" who delay releasing research on experimental therapies in a highly bureaucratic, publish-or-perish environment. In previous speeches from the Vatican to Capitol Hill, Biden has threatened to cut National Institutes of Health grants to slow-footed medical institutions. He has also criticized drug companies for charging "astronomical" prices for some treatments and has advocated for more investment in seeking less profitable cures for those cancers that affect fewer people. A task force of prominent health care leaders assembled by the vice president has reached consensus on dozens of strategies to streamline collaborations and rapidly improve access to care, Biden said Wednesday.

Among the recommendations is to incentivize cancer researchers to take risks in their labs without jeopardizing federal grant funding, and to make that research widely available at no cost. Biden noted that a public-private partnership involving a limited number of pharmaceutical companies now allows researchers to test existing drugs for new combinations in treating different forms of cancer. He also pointed to the website, trials.cancer.gov to help patients locate clinical trials for which they are eligible. By aggregating and sharing data on millions of patients, including genomics, family histories, lifestyles and treatment outcomes, and harnessing supercomputing technologies, "we're closer than ever before to understanding what causes cancer, knowing how to attack particular cancers," Biden said. If nothing changes, the world will see nearly 20 million new cancer cases and 11.4 million cancer deaths by 2025, he said.

"Cancer is taking your loved ones and mine, robbing them of decades of productive life," he said. At the same ceremony, the World Affairs Council of Philadelphia presented a local Atlas Award to the Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center at Jefferson University for its integrated approach to oncology, research and training programs and outreach efforts to cancer survivors and their families. Center Director Karen Knudsen said Wednesday her team has heard Biden's "call to arms" and has worked to remove accessibility barriers and increase cooperation in the lab and beyond.