
Vice President Biden speaking about the Cancer Moonshot Task Force’s report to the president. (Image credit – White House)
Vice President Biden speaking about the Cancer Moonshot Task Force’s report to the president. (Image credit – White House)
On Oct. 17, Vice President Joe Biden submitted an implementation plan
The report highlights accomplishments of the task force to date and lists planned actions for the upcoming year mapped to five strategic goals: (1) catalyze scientific breakthroughs, (2) unleash the power of data, (3) accelerate bringing new therapies to patients, (4) strengthen prevention and diagnosis, and (5) improve patient access and care.
At the report rollout event
Biden also reflected on how far cancer research has come since President Richard Nixon declared a “war on cancer” in 1971, while lamenting that certain research practices from Nixon’s era have persisted too long. “Too often our cancer culture and system plays by the rules of ’71, not 2016,” he said, later adding, “There was no need for team science in 1971. There wasn’t much data to share in 1971.”
He proceeded to present a vision of a research culture in which scientists are more receptive to sharing and analyzing huge datasets, leveraging multiple disciplines, and incorporating additional federal agencies, such as NASA and the Department of Energy. Among the actions highlighted in the report are the establishment of partnerships between the National Cancer Institute and both DOE and NASA. The intent of these pairings is to leverage DOE’s supercomputing capabilities and NASA’s radiation research expertise.
The report also notes the importance of establishing deeper relationships with the private sector and academia. One such effort is being led by the National Photonics Initiative (NPI), an alliance of scientific societies and industry groups focused on identifying and fostering important new areas of photonics research. (The American Physical Society and the Optical Society, both AIP Member Societies, are founding members of the NPI.) In support of the moonshot initiative, the NPI released a technology roadmap
Toward the end of his speech, Biden reflected on the importance of maintaining a spirit of optimism. “It disturbs me that for the first time in my career, over the last decade, some of the American people are no longer of the view that we can do anything,” he said. “Well we can do virtually anything … Within the next five to six years we’ll be calculating a billion billion calculations per second. What was it 10 years ago? We are on the cusp of so many just enormous breakthroughs, your children are going to see more progress in the next 15 years than have happened in the last 50 years.”
He went on to invoke the famous passage from President John F. Kennedy’s 1962 speech
The moonshot report comes at a time when DOE has been actively considering ways to collaborate more with the National Institutes of Health. In particular, last November Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz directed the Secretary of Energy Advisory Board to establish a task force charged with identifying new areas of DOE-supported research that could accelerate progress in biomedical sciences and new mechanisms to bring together DOE and NIH researchers.
Steven Koonin, a former undersecretary for science at DOE, and Harold Varmus, a former director of both NIH and NCI, co-chaired the task force, which issued its final report
The report’s final passage reflects on the challenges and opportunities of increasing DOE-NIH collaboration:
The predominantly mission-driven culture of DOE, dominated by team science and by physics and engineering will not mix easily with the disease-oriented culture of NIH, dominated by grants to individual investigators. However, it is encouraging that the cultures of each agency are not monolithic.
For example, DOE does (and will no doubt continue to) support some single-investigator work, and NIH does support multi-user capabilities like NCBI [the National Center for Biotechnology Information] (part of the National Library of Medicine) clinical trials, and genomics projects. The recently announced national BRAIN and Cancer Moonshot initiatives provide valuable incentives and venues for greater interagency cooperation.
And, then there will be the understandable pressure to keep the individual agencies focused on their separate historical missions. But, failure to address these challenges will, in our opinion, leave far too many opportunities unrealized in the national effort to accelerate progress in the biomedical sciences.