>> I like looking for mountains to climb.
Last year, my family and I went to Kilimanjaro to climb the highest mountain in Africa.
Amazing experience.
I've been looking at the world at a very large scale.
So that it's almost incomprehensible by humans.
[ Cheering ]
That whole experience gives proper perspective to the things that we're trying to do.
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Up to this point, we've been able to look at cancer at a very high level.
So, we haven't been able to see more than just that two-dimensional view
of the different cells that make up a tumor.
Now we're able to look at cancers at multiple different scales.
We can get down to the level where you can look in somebody's backyard,
and the Human Tumor Atlas is a project that allows us to do that.
[ Music ]
That contextual understanding is really what's going to transform our understanding of cancer.
It's a really exciting place for us to be right now.
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>> A bold public effort to focus on a complex set of diseases fueled
by a $1.8 billion government investment, supporting more than 240 research projects,
across 70 initiatives, driven by team science and data sharing.
Changing the culture of research to reduce the burden of cancer
on everyone whose lives are affected.
Cancer Moonshot.
>> Hi, my name is Shelley Hwang, I'm Chief of Breast Surgery at Duke University.
There are a few things that get me out of bed in the morning, and one of those things is to be
in the clinic and to meet patients who need my care.
[ Footsteps ]
[ Knocking ]
I've seen several thousand patients newly diagnosed with cancer at this point,
and I think my primary responsibility is to the patient who's sitting right in front of me.
You know, being truly myself, being completely present when I'm taking care of patients,
whether it's in the clinic or in the operating room.
But I think research allows us to have a greater impact and possibly a greater responsibility
to the patient community at large.
That is to make life better for patients who will be diagnosed
with breast cancer in the future.
So, one of the things I'm really excited about is being Principal Investigator of one
of the Human Tumor Atlas Network sites.
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The Moonshot funding was really critical in getting all of our networks off the ground.
Together, we're developing new spatial technology, where we're able to look not only
at the tumor itself, the whole tumor, but looking at individual cells within the tumor.
This is a piece of tissue.
It's stained in different colors.
You can really see the blood vessels.
The cancer cells are coming into view.
It's really neat, right?
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There were major gaps in what we knew about cancer, and one of the gaps was
that we just didn't understand how cancers were organized in three dimensions.
Actually, that fourth dimension of time was something
that we didn't understand very well either.
These are the globules of the cancer cells.
Now we're understanding the three-dimensional structure of cancers
and how they evolve over space and time.
These are the tumor cells, the clusters of cells, that you see here.
It's a complete game changer.
[ Music ]
It's actually been pretty amazing, the progress that we've made since the start of the Moonshot.
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There is a central data coordinating center as part of HTAN collecting all
of these very large data sets that are open sourced.
So now, our community is really coming together to answer some really big questions
on a much bigger scale that we weren't able to answer before.
What constitutes the neighborhood where a cancer lives?
How can we improve or strengthen our neighborhoods
so that they're more resistant to development of cancer?
Unlocking meaning in the relationships that the different parts of the tumor ecosystem have
with each other is really something we've never been able to do before.
The investment the American people have made has allowed scientists to make progress
in ways that were not possible before.
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>> The Human Tumor Atlas Network is being supported by the Cancer Moonshot,
a White House initiative first launched in 2016 and re-ignited by President Biden in 2022
to accelerate the rate of progress against cancer.
The National Cancer Act of 1971 set the foundation for programs like Cancer Moonshot.
Fifty years of progress.
Nothing will stop us.
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