At SXSW, the former vice president lays out how the government’s Cancer Moonshot has helped foster breakthroughs.
Vice President Joe Biden, speaking about the White House Cancer Moonshot Task Force’s mission on October 19, 2016 in Boston.
The fight against cancer thrives on new technologies, but also on old-fashioned cooperation.
That was the message from former US Vice President Joe Biden, speaking Sunday at SXSW about the White House Cancer Moonshot program that he got rolling in early 2016. President Obama made him “mission control” of the effort, he said, with broad authority to shape things as he saw fit.
What he saw was a culture not changing fast enough. There was a need for greater collaboration among medical and research disciplines.
“This Cancer Moonshot, when it was born, we decided to take a new approach to conquering cancer,” Biden said.
It would also benefit from decades of scientific advances since President Nixon declared a ” war on cancer. ”
Surgeons can now use cutting-edge robotics to allow more precise imaging, conduct more precise surgery and to remove tumors with less damage to the surrounding tissue. Powerful new technologies and tools like immunotherapy, he said, now make cancer cells visible to the immune system so people’s natural defenses can destroy the cancer.
The Moonshot program has also drawn the participation of some prominent Silicon Valley companies. For instance, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft in October teamed up with the National Cancer Institute to devise a system for maintaining cancer genomic data in the cloud and making it available to researchers.
