We are at an exciting time in our understanding of cancer and the way we're approaching how
we treat it and I think before long, the way we are approaching how we will prevent it.
The science is here, the time is right.
There are new therapies being developed at a rapid rate.
Our field is just energized.
The Vice President’s cancer initiative comes at exactly the right time to really help us
accelerate our understanding of the whole cancer process.
The Blue Ribbon Panel was given a very important charge, which was to think about what could
be done in ten years and to try to do it in five.
We have come up with recommendations to help move science and progress in cancer.
The Blue Ribbon Panel has really come together to identify those areas that are really poised
for acceleration.
Our goal is to achieve better outcomes for patients with cancer and to reduce the number
of cancers that occur in the first place.
Some of them are going to just be trying to enhance our understanding of cancer and some
are going to be trying to improve implementation and dissemination of what we already know
works.
Whether it’s about metastasis or whether it’s about drug resistance or whether it’s
about understanding response and resistance to immunotherapy in adult cancer, pediatric
cancer…
The recommendation to speed up research is to do a national clinical trial in which we
look at various forms of immunotherapy to try to understand why some patients respond
to check point blockers and other do not.
It is precision medicine.
It’s a total evaluation of the patient’s tumor and other aspects of the individual
patient.
To have the resources to make advances in immune therapy, to understand drug resistance.
Being able to eliminate cancer based on our deep genetic understanding.
Part of this concept as an atlas, whether it’s an immune atlas or whether it’s a
tumor evolution atlas, is to really link genetic data with inflammatory immune data, with epigenetic
data, with pharmacokinetic data, and then with clinical data so that we can really make
big data usable to all of us.
It’s really to create a- a whole cancer data ecosystem.
To get patients to be actively engaged in the process.
We have these guidelines, we have these recommendations.
How do we bring it to the people who need it the most?
Because it is about access.
This moon shot blue ribbon is about all patients.
There’s not question that all these recommendations are cross cutting and will get to these patients.
This is an opportunity to bring people together.
The initiative has galvanized the community in a way that I haven’t seen before.
Advocates, researchers, government, industry came together to really help this initiative.
The Vice President with his passion and commitment says he's going to be doing this for the rest
of his life.
And with him as our champion I think we're going to do very well.
He wants to make this happen and he is 100 percent committed to making this happen.
We need a champion and he is definitely the one- one.
This is an opportunity for our field, for our country.
We're extremely energized and optimistic about what the moonshot can do.
We really hope that this will turn into therapies that can hopefully cure patients with metastatic
disease.
I truly do believe it will lead to better outcomes.
This is the first time I've seen these amount of excitement uh, behind cancer research.
Our job now is to make sure that these initiatives and these recommendations that we're putting
forth benefit everyone.
And I think that’s the challenge.