Biden re-launches effort aimed at cutting cancer deaths by half

United States President Joe Biden has announced a relaunch of a government “moonshot” effort to cut cancer deaths in half within 25 years.

The effort was first launched in 2016 and poured $1.8bn of federal funds into combatting cancer across seven years. Biden, whose son Beau died of brain cancer in 2015 at age 46, spearheaded the original initiative as vice president.

Just $400m remain of the original funding, according to US officials, and Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris are seeking to reignite the initiative with “renewed White House leadership”.

“I committed to this fight when I was vice president,” Biden said on Wednesday at the White House. “Let there be no doubt, now that I’m president, this is a presidential White House priority,”

Tackling cancer is “one of the reasons, quite frankly, why I ran for president”, said Biden, who called on Congress to approve new funds for the initiative.

Biden appeared in the East Room of the White House along with his wife, Jill; Vice President Harris; members of Congress and about 100 members of the cancer community, including patients, survivors, caregivers, families, advocacy groups and research organisations.

“Cancer ended my mother’s life,” Harris said. “I will never forget the day she sat me and my sister down and told us she had been diagnosed with colon cancer. It was one of the worst days of my life.”

Biden announced he would be creating a “cancer cabinet” to include officials from 18 US agencies, including leaders from the departments of Health and Human Services, Veterans Affairs, Defense, Energy and Agriculture.

The White House will host a summit on the cancer initiative and continue a roundtable discussion series on the subject.

Biden called on the private sector to go “bolder” in pursuing cures and therapies.

The re-upped initiative would rely on “progress in cancer therapeutics, diagnostics, and patient-driven care, as well as the scientific advances and public health lessons of the COVID-19 pandemic”, according to a White House fact sheet.

“It’s now possible to set ambitious goals: to reduce the death rate from cancer by at least 50 percent over the next 25 years,” according to the White House.

The American Cancer Society has estimated that there will be 1,918,000 new cancer cases and 609,000 cancer deaths in 2022.

What Biden has aimed to do is essentially save more than 300,000 lives annually from the disease, something the administration believes is possible because the age-adjusted death rate has already fallen by roughly 25 percent during the past two decades.

The coronavirus pandemic has consumed healthcare resources and caused people to miss more than 9.5 million cancer screenings, according to officials.

The initiative leans on developments that allow medical professionals to diagnose cancer sooner, and on progress in technologies that could help to prevent cancer. It will further seek to address underlying inequalities in access to cancer screenings and treatment.