When you are making a point that the country that put humans on the moon also has the capacity to cure cancers, venue and timing matter. On Sept. 12, President Joe Biden chose John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum—and the 60th anniversary of Kennedy’s 1962 moonshot speech—to announce his plan’s latest iteration.
More than six years after launching the Cancer Moonshot and vacillating between using and not using the word “cure,” Biden seems to have decided to declare that cures are the Moonshot’s ultimate goal.
“Today, I’m setting a long-term goal for the Cancer Moonshot to rally America and ingenuity that we can engage, like we did to reach the moon, that actually cures cancers, not all cancer—cancers—cures for cancers, once and for all,” Biden said at the JFK Library in Boston.
Biden’s space-themed speech included two announcements of great terrestrial significance:
- An executive order to create the National Biotechnology and Biomanufacturing Initiative, and
- Renee Wegrzyn, a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency alumna, would run the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Health, a bioengineering-based agency that, under his plan, would play a key role in “ending cancer as we know it.”
“The leading biomedical scientist, a decade of experience leading multiple biotech projects at DARPA,” Biden said. “And, by the way, it’s about how to use all the assets we have—all of them. An entrepreneur in synthetic biology.
“She’s—you’re going to bring the legendary DARPA attitude and culture and boldness and risk-taking to ARPA-H to fill a critical need. Discoveries that save lives, change lives—they often start on the lab bench.”
Wegrzyn is an executive at a genetic engineering biotech and a former program manager of biological technologies at DARPA. She received her PhD in molecular biology and bioengineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2003.
“I predict ARPA-H will emerge as a new and exciting member of America’s biomedical ecosystem,” Biden said. “But it’s not enough to invent technologies that save lives. We need to manufacture advanced biotechnologies here in the United States.
“That’s why today I signed an executive order that directs the federal government to ensure biotechnologies invented in the United States of America are made in the United States of America, whether they are for cancer treatments or anything else, like next-generation fuels and materials.”
The executive order was followed by a Sept. 14 summit that convenes leaders across federal agencies to chart a path for spending $2 billion to shore up the nation’s biotechnology manufacturing infrastructure. To bring bio-products to market, the mandate includes a directive for FDA to develop capabilities for supporting “advanced manufacturing” through updated regulatory science and “increased engagement” with industry.
All eyes are now on Wegrzyn to deliver on the promise of ARPA-H, which received $1 billion in FY22 (The Cancer Letter, June 24, 2022).
“I called for ARPA-H in my campaign,” Biden said. “And after being elected president, notwithstanding the fact that Democrats and Republicans allegedly don’t talk to one another, Republicans, independents, and Democrats in Congress came together and invested $1 billion initially to launch ARPA-H.”
In a statement Sept. 12, the American Society of Clinical Oncology announced its support for Biden’s “additional efforts to solidify supply chains and ensure U.S. competitiveness in biomedical technologies to improve health outcomes.”
“Improved access to high-quality, equitable care for all cancer patients means access to innovative treatments that are a result of global oncology research and investments,” Lori. J Pierce, board chair of ASCO, said. “ARPA-H has the potential to further innovate and expedite research, particularly for all cancers and in collaboration with the goals of the Cancer Moonshot.
“We look forward to working with the new inaugural director of ARPA-H, Renee Wegrzyn, PhD, to improve the health outcomes for all cancer patients through transformative, high-risk, high-reward research that fills [a] gap in the current biomedical research enterprise.”
Biden: “Cure cancers once and for all”
Evoking Kennedy’s 1962 moonshot speech, Biden’s latest push for the cure harkens back to the origins of the Cancer Moonshot, which was rolled out in 2016 as “A Moonshot to Cure Cancer” (The Cancer Letter, Jan. 16, 2016).
When President Barack Obama first announced the Cancer Moonshot, the biomedical research community rallied—it doesn’t hurt to have the White House as an advocate and ally—and offered mild critique, cautioning against overpromising (The Cancer Letter, Jan. 22, 2016).
Since then, Biden has used more nuanced variations on the theme of the cure. “End cancer as we know it” became the battle cry of the Moonshot.
“I’m not naïve to think that, as some have suggested, that we’re going to have a cure to every cancer in the world, that that’s going to come in the near term,” Biden said at the World Economic Forum in January 2016 (The Cancer Letter, Jan. 22, 2016). “That’s not what is happening.”
In the intervening years, cancer research has proved to be most prolific—topping FDA’s annual list for most drugs approved in a therapeutic area—and “cure” returned to the lexicon of oncology.
Former NCI Director Ned Sharpless led the charge as a moderating voice of optimism (The Cancer Letter, June 8, 2018; April 1, 2022)
“I think we have become scared to tell our patients that we hope to ‘cure’ them, and it may be time to re-examine how we communicate our efforts in this area,” Sharpless said at the 2018 ASCO annual meeting. “Sometimes, we now do have a cure. Now, there is enormous optimism in our field. There is reason for this optimism.”
Adopting a similar approach in 2022, Biden is scrupulous in his definition of the “cure,” namely, the Cancer Moonshot aims to cure “cancers”—as opposed to “cancer”—and he doubles back to make certain that the audience recognizes the distinction between the hundreds of cancer subtypes vs. cancer as a collective singular.
“I believe we can usher in the same unwillingness to postpone, the same national purpose that will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills to end cancer as we know it, and even cure cancers once and for all,” Biden said in his Moonshot speech.
“We learned cancer is not a single disease, but there are over 200 different types of cancers caused by different genetic mutations in our cells. We discovered new medicines, therapies, early detection and prevention measures to extend and to save lives.”
A video of the Moonshot event in Boston appears here.
An excerpt of Biden’s Sept. 12 remarks follows:
This is a powerful place for reflection and remembrance.
On this day in 1962, America was facing an inflection point—one of those times that changes everything, from the day before to the day after. The shadow of world wars cast over a Cold War. The march on civil rights, urgent yet uncertain.
And against all of that and more, America faced a choice: to move forward or to move backwards; to build the future or obsess about the past; to be a nation of unity and hope and optimism, or a nation of division, violence, and hatred.
At this inflection point, President Kennedy made a choice for the nation, thank God. On this day in 1962, at Rice University in Houston, he spoke about America’s possibilities.
I was asked by Xi Jinping—who I’ve met with more than any other world leader—in the Tibetan Plateau, and he turned to me and he said, “Can you define America for me?” And I said, “Yes.” And I was sincere. I said, “One word: possibilities.” In America, we believe anything is possible. And I mean it.
And in choosing to go to the moon, President Kennedy said America was doing so, quote, “not because it was easy, but because it was hard, because the goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.”
“Unwilling to postpone.” President Kennedy set a goal to win the Space Race against Russia and advance science and technology for all of humanity. And when he set that goal, he established a national purpose that could rally the American people in a common cause. And he succeeded.
Now, in our time, on the 60th anniversary of his clarion call, we face another inflection point. And together, we can choose to move forward with unity, hope, and optimism.
And I believe we can usher in the same unwillingness to postpone, the same national purpose that will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills to end cancer as we know it, and even cure cancers once and for all.
I give you my word as a Biden: This Cancer Moonshot is one of the reasons why I ran for president. It’s part of my Unity Agenda that I laid out in my State of the Union Address to rally the American people to work together. Because we know this: Cancer does not discriminate red and blue; it doesn’t care if you’re a Republican or a Democrat.
Beating cancer is something we can do together. And that’s why I’m here today.
We’ve made enormous progress in the past 50 years since President Nixon signed the National Cancer Act to declare a war on cancer.
We learned cancer is not a single disease, but there are over 200 different types of cancers caused by different genetic mutations in our cells. We discovered new medicines, therapies, early detection and prevention measures to extend and to save lives.
In the first 25 years since the National Cancer Act, the death rate from cancer largely remained unchanged. Then things began to change.
With progress over the last 25 years, the death rate from cancer has fallen more than 25%. But despite the progress of lives extended, lives saved, cancer is still the number two cause of death in America second only to heart disease.
For too many cancer patients and their families, instead of hope, there’s bewilderment; the feeling of being on your own; frustration that hospitals and doctors can’t easily share your medical records with other hospitals and doctors to help find answers even when every minute counts; having to advocate for even the most basic care and attention for your loved ones; the flood of information is completely different—is a completely different language, with few people help and available to help you decipher it; having therapy that work—that could work within reach, but it’s too expensive or insurance won’t cover it.
And so when President Obama asked me to launch the Cancer Moonshot, our goal was to bring an added urgency—a new urgency to the fight and, in my view, not unlike President Kennedy did.
We harnessed federal resources to change the culture, increase cooperation, and break down the silos that exist. That included everything from making published results of federally funded cancer research more available to any patient, to any doctor, for free instead of the firewall that had been set up.
That included the recognition that for many cancer patients it’s hard to even know if there’s a clinical trial that can help them, let alone how to enroll in one. So we launched Trials.Cancer.gov so everyone can find a clinical trial near them or across the country and the world, and they can gain access to these trials.
I’ve traveled the country, brought together leaders in healthcare, technology, education, business, philanthropy. I visited many of the major cancer research centers in the world. And nowhere—no matter where I was or what the topic at hand, world leaders wanted to talk to me about our Cancer Moonshot. That’s not hyperbole, that’s a fact.
For example, Pope Francis convened a major international conference on cell therapies at the Vatican, and he invited me to speak about our mission. And one of the final pieces of legislation President Obama signed into law was the bipartisan 21st Century Cures Act.
It streamlined the Food and Drug Administration—the FDA—by creating an Oncology Center of Excellence so new cancer treatments can be evaluated faster. It provided seven years of new funding, including research on cancer therapies and the disparities, trial networks to discover new drugs, and new efforts on childhood cancer.
As president of the United States Senate, I presided over the overwhelming bipartisan vote and watched my friend Mitch McConnell name the cancer provisions in that bill after my son Beau, who had lost his life to that disease just months earlier.
And when we left office, Jill and I knew we had to keep it going through, keep it up—so we initiated the Biden Cancer Initiative.
We focused on turning the Moonshot into a movement—not just a shot, a movement—to create a cancer research and care system that most people think we already have but they don’t realize until they find they have cancer that we don’t, but one that we deserve.
And everywhere we’d go, people would share their stories, literally, in grocery stores, airports, rope lines. While we heard stories of loss and despair, the stories began to change to a feeling of real hope, not because of me or Jill, but because of all of you and so many of you at home: doctors, researchers, advocates, caregivers, patients, survivors.
And that’s when I was elected president, and I determined to supercharge the Cancer Moonshot as a central effort in the Biden-Harris administration.
In February, I laid out our plan that is bold, ambitious, and, I might add, completely doable.
The goal is to cut cancer death rates by at least 50% in the next 25 years; to turn more cancers from death sentences into chronic diseases people can live with; to create a more supportive experience for our patients and families; and to update our fight against cancer.
It’s a disease we often diagnose too late and have too few ways to prevent it in the first place; where there are stark inequities based on race, disability, ZIP code, sexual orientation, gender identity, and other factors. We know too little about why treatments work for some patients but the same patient—a different patient with the same disease it doesn’t work for.
We still lack strategies for developing treatments for some cancers, like childhood cancers.
We don’t do enough to help patients and families navigate the cancer care system.
We don’t learn enough from their experience as patients.
We don’t share enough data and knowledge to bring the urgency we need to finding new answers.
But for each of the ways we know cancer today, we know we can change the trajectory.
For example, to prevent cancers, scientists are exploring whether mRNA vaccine technology that brought us safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines could be used to stop cancer cells when they first arise.
To target the right treatments, we’re learning more about how to use genetics, immune response, and other factors to tell which combinations of treatments are likely to work best for each individual.
To address the inequities, we can ensure prevention, detection, treatment; reach patients in urban, rural, and suburban, and Tribal communities so they have equal access to cancer diagnostics, therapeutics, and clinical trials.
As part of the supercharged Moonshot, I’ll use my authorities as president to increase funding to break logjam—break logjams and to speed breakthroughs.
I’ve also formed a new Cancer Cabinet that is driving a whole-of-government effort to unleash every possible asset within our power—from NASA, that knows more about radiation than any doctor does; to the Defense Department, that has the ability to calculate; and to the Energy Department—do a million billion calculations per second.
Health and Human Services Secretary Becerra plays a key role in the Cancer Cabinet, as does Marty Walsh, a childhood cancer survivor who is committed to helping Americans get time off for cancer screenings or care for a loved one.
The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy is changing the path of the—for the Cancer Moonshot for 2022 and beyond.
And today, I’m setting a long-term goal for the Cancer Moonshot to rally America and ingenuity that we can engage, like we did to reach the moon, that actually cures cancers, not all cancer—cancers—cures for cancers, once and for all.
And a critical way to do that is going through what I call ARPA-H, Advanced Research Project Agencies for Health. It’s based on DARPA, the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency, that has helped lead to breakthroughs in technologies to protect our national security, like the Internet, GPS, and so much more.
ARPA-H will have the singular purpose to drive breakthroughs to prevent, detect, and treat diseases—including cancer, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, and other diseases—and enable us to live healthier lives.
I believe we can usher in the same unwillingness to postpone, the same national purpose that will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills to end cancer as we know it, and even cure cancers once and for all.
President Joe Biden
I called for ARPA-H in my campaign. And after being elected president, notwithstanding the fact that Democrats and Republicans allegedly don’t talk to one another, Republicans, independents, and Democrats in Congress came together and invested $1 billion initially to launch ARPA-H.
Imagine the possibilities: vaccines that could prevent cancer, like the race for HPV.
Imagine molecular ZIP codes that could deliver drugs and gene therapy precisely to the right tissues.
Imagine a simple blood test during an annual physical that could detect cancer early, where the chances of a cure are best.
Imagine getting a simple shot instead of a grueling chemo or getting a pill from a local pharmacy instead of invasive treatments and long hospital stays.
Imagine treatments beyond cancer. Bold approaches to reduce maternal mortality and morbidity, something vice president Harris is laser-focused on.
And imagine artificial retinas that could help blind people see.
These are just a few of the ideas to illustrate the amazing potential of ARPA-H.
When President Kennedy called for a Moonshot, we didn’t have all the tools and experience needed. With our Cancer Moonshot, today we do.
And I’m pleased to announce my selection as the inaugural director of ARPA-H, Dr. Renee Wegryzn, who is here today. Doctor, where are you? Stand up. The leading biomedical scientist, a decade of experience leading multiple biotech projects at DARPA. And, by the way, it’s about how to use all the assets we have—all of them. An entrepreneur in synthetic biology.
She’s—you’re going to bring the legendary DARPA attitude and culture and boldness and risk-taking to ARPA-H to fill a critical need. Discoveries that save lives, change lives, and often start—they often start in the lab bench.
But then those basic research breakthroughs need to be tested, scaled, and brought to the clinic. This may require unusual partnerships that may require support to get over many obstacles that exist. That’s what ARPA-H is designed—what it’s designed to do, so the advances can reach all Americans sooner.
I predict ARPA-H will emerge as a new and exciting member of America’s biomedical ecosystem. But it’s not enough to invent technologies that save lives. We need to manufacture advanced biotechnologies here in the United States.
That’s why today I signed an executive order that directs the federal government to ensure biotechnologies invented in the United States of America are made in the United States of America, whether they are for cancer treatments or anything else, like next-generation fuels and materials.
Today’s action is going to ensure that America leads the world in biotechnology and biomanufacturing, creating jobs, reducing prices, strengthening supply chains so we don’t have to rely on anywhere else in the world. Here in America it’ll be made. And here’s—there’s more that we’re doing.
The Inflation Reduction Act that I signed into law puts a $2,000 cap on the total prescription drug cost for any senior on Medicare, including cancer medicine. And for so many people, one of the first things they think about when they get a diagnosis: “How am I going to pay for the treatment? Do we need to sell the house? Do we need to skip payments on the car? Can we afford to send the kids to college?”
The Inflation Reduction Act is a godsend. It’s going to save people on one prostate cancer drug about $6,000 a year. Thousands of women are taking breast cancer treatments that will see about $7,000-a-year savings.
But that’s not all. When I led the Cancer Moonshot as vice president, one of the biggest issues I talked about was how federally funded cancer researchers were not sharing their results with their peers or the public because they wanted to have the answer. You all know it.
As I mentioned earlier, we made federally funded cancer research more available to any patient, to any doctor anywhere for free.
And today, as president, we’re making sure that transparency applies to all federally funded science beyond just cancer.
And this summer, I announced a new head of the National Cancer Institute, Boston’s own Monica Bertagnolli. And she’s here today. Where are you, Monica? Stand up. Thank you.
The National Cancer Institute is launching a major national trial for those new tests I mentioned that could detect one or more cancers merely by taking blood samples. You know, if that’s the case, these blood tests could lead to less invasive cancer detection tools that will save lives.
We’re also launching the first-ever Cancer Moonshot Scholar program to support a new generation of scientists from every background, from every part of the country, to launch their cutting-edge research and careers.
But we need everyone to get in the game. That’s why I’m also calling on the science and medical communities to bring the boldest thinking to this fight. I’m calling on the private sector to develop and test new treatments, make drugs more affordable, share more data and knowledge that can inform the public and benefit every company’s research.
And I’m respectfully calling on people living with cancer, and caregivers and families, to keep sharing their experience and pushing for progress. Go to WhiteHouse.gov/CancerMoonshot. Share your ideas. So many of you already made a difference.
Last month, I signed the so-called PACT Act into law, one of the most significant laws helping veterans and their families impacted by toxic exposure like burn pits that lead to cancer.
It was veterans and their families, advocates and allies who helped me get this bill to my desk. They never gave up. They never stopped. They slept on the Capitol steps. It matters. It’s personal to all of us.
So, let me close with this:
Caroline, I couldn’t be here and not talk about your uncle, Teddy. He was one of my dearest friends. One of the things that brings us close as families is the dreaded cancer that he and my Beau fought to the end and died months apart.
After Beau passed, Vicki wrote me a letter about how after Ted lost his older brother Joe, his father wrote to a friend who just lost his son. Caroline, your grandfather wrote, and I quote:
“When one of your loved ones goes out of your life, you think of what he might have done with a few more years, and you wonder what you’re going to do with the rest of yours.
Then one day, because there is a world to be lived in, you find you are part of it trying to accomplish something—something he did not have time enough to do.
“And perhaps that is the reason for it all. I hope so.”
For so many of us, that’s what we’re trying to do—live a life worthy of the loved ones we’ve lost and the loved ones we can save, with their hope and absolute courage, and with an unwillingness to postpone and with a singular purpose for ourselves and as a nation.
President Kennedy said on this day 60 years ago, “We set sail on this new sea because there is new, [life-saving] knowledge to be gained” that must be used for “progress of all people.”
In our time today, that’s our charge to keep, in my view. I know we can do this together because I know this: There is nothing—nothing—nothing beyond our capacity if we work together as the United States of America.
God bless you all. And may God protect our troops. Thank you for listening.
