A 25-year old idea, a concept named “the American Centers for Cures,” proposed by Lou Weisbach, a former CEO of a Fortune 500 company and a political insider, aims to shift the paradigm of research funding.
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In this episode of The Cancer Letter Podcast, Jacquelyn Cobb, associate editor of The Cancer Letter, and Paul Goldberg, editor and publisher, talk about Weisbach’s bold $750 billion bond plan aimed at curing diseases. At a time of NIH upheaval, while funding is in limbo for a great amount of biomedical research—the idea is gaining some momentum.
“The idea is, the depth of it, is the system that we have in oncology—and this is beyond oncology—were it to be built today, it would look very very different from what it is right now,” Paul said. “Which is true. It’s a system that evolved.”
“What these guys are suggesting is to design something that is more driven to produce outcomes, as opposed to studying the thing,” Paul said.
The scientist’s job would be to cure the disease. And, if they don’t, there is accountability, Jacquelyn said.
“It’s turning the whole process of cancer and biomedical research on its head,” Jacquelyn said. “It’s a lot more like a business,”
Weisbach wants the federal government to issue $750 billion in bonds over six years to fund the enterprise, and he plans to bring his idea to the White House.
Stories mentioned this week include:
- As Trump decimates NIH funding, a daring proposal to issue $750 billion in bonds for medical cures garners attention
- Lou Weisbach tells us about his plan to raise $750 billion for the American Center for Cures
- Mark J. Ratain, David A. Hyman, Jill E. Feldman, Beth R. Jacobson, Allen S. Lichter: Optimizing dosing of expensive and toxic oncology drugs: Making America healthier
- Donald L. “Skip” Trump, Eric T. Rosenthal: Federal funding cutbacks undermine advances in cancer research and treatment—What would Richard Nixon and Ted Kennedy think?
- Linda Malkas: From “undruggable” target to clinical potential: The journey of AOH1996
- “Forward funding” NIH budget plan would make competing for grants much harder
- Federal judge rules Trump directives canceling NIH grants “illegal,” orders them to be restored
- NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya launches a podcast
This episode was transcribed using transcription services. It has been reviewed by our editorial staff, but the transcript may be imperfect.
The following is a transcript of this week’s In the Headlines, a weekly series on the Cancer Letter Podcast:
Jacquelyn Cobb: This week on The Cancer Letter Podcast.
Paul Goldberg: Here’s a bunch of people at major cancer centers who are doing data science, and that will change a lot. And that is because the government wasted, you might use the word wasted, it was about $350 million boondoggle, or was it? Maybe not.
Jacquelyn Cobb: No, yeah.
Paul Goldberg: There are a lot of mini boondoggles that followed the National Cancer Act of 1971, which actually turned out not to be boondoggles at all. I mean, people were talking about viral oncology program being rife with favoritism, poor contracting, and whatever other nonsense. But look at, we wouldn’t have immunotherapy if not for that cancer viral oncology program.
Jacquelyn Cobb: Wow.
Paul Goldberg: So yeah, it does take shaking things up and it does take money. And if they shake things up and come up with some money, something very good could come of it at what looks like a really bad time, the worst time that’s ever been.
You are listening to The Cancer Letter Podcast. The Cancer Letter is a weekly independent magazine covering oncology since 1973. I’m your host, Paul Goldberg, editor and publisher of The Cancer Letter.
Jacquelyn Cobb: And I’m your host, Jacquelyn Cobb, associate editor of the Cancer Letter. We’ll be bringing you the latest stories, groundbreaking research and critical conversations shaping oncology.
Paul Goldberg: So, let’s get going.
Jacquelyn Cobb: Hello, Paul. How’s it going?
Paul Goldberg: Oh, hi Jacquelyn. How are you in a great state of Maine, where it’s cooler than it is here in Washington?
Jacquelyn Cobb: It is cooler, but we’re having a heat wave up here too. Definitely not… You guys have what, 100 degree weather?
Paul Goldberg: Something like that. It’s a little unpleasant.
Jacquelyn Cobb: Yeah, we’re at 83 and we’re complaining, but I am liking it. The evenings are still chilly, which is really, really nice.
Paul Goldberg: That’s nice.
Jacquelyn Cobb: Yes, it’s lovely.
Paul Goldberg: Could probably cook an egg on the pavement here. I’m not going to try.
Jacquelyn Cobb: Maybe you should. It could be a fun experiment.
Paul Goldberg: That would be a fun experiment. But with the price of eggs…
Jacquelyn Cobb: So true. So true. You need a quail egg or something.
Paul Goldberg: Indeed.
Jacquelyn Cobb: All right, I will take us through this week’s headlines. I’m going to skip the first two stories for now because that’s what we’re going to dive into as the meat of the podcast. But we had a guest editorial by five directors of the Optimal Cancer Care Alliance, about how optimizing dosing of oncology drugs has the potential to, quote unquote, “make America healthier.” The five directors were Mark Ratain from the University of Chicago Medicine, David A. Hyman, Georgetown University, Jill Feldman, lung cancer patient advocate and lung cancer patient as well, and the co-founder of EGFR Resisters, Beth R. Jacobson, general counsel at the Octave Health Group, Inc, and Allen S. Lichter, senior partner of TGR Health Care and former CEO of ASCO.
We also had a guest editorial by Donald Skip Trump and Eric Rosenthal, that took a look at the current administration’s funding cuts and firings from a historical perspective, asking the question, what would President Nixon and Senator Kennedy think of, quote, the Trump administration’s willy-nilly approach to defunding medical research and hobbling the nation’s cancer research program? So very strong guest editorial from them. Very good to read and listen to.
Claire took on all of our cancer policy last week. She’s an absolute rock star. She wrote about the, quote unquote, “forward funding” NIH budget plan, as well as a federal judge ruling that Trump’s canceling of NIH grants is illegal. And NIH director Jay Bhattacharya has launched a new podcast, which I think should be coming out weekly. So very interesting as well as many other things in that cancer policy. Claire truly was a-
Paul Goldberg: We have competition, Jac.
Jacquelyn Cobb: I know. And it’s called The Director’s Desk, I believe. So who knows?
Paul Goldberg: So you and I better be good at this [inaudible 00:04:57].
Jacquelyn Cobb: I know.
Paul Goldberg: Because they may just not need journalists. They may just be able to do the coverage of themselves by themselves.
Jacquelyn Cobb: Yeah, yeah. Speak directly to the people.
Paul Goldberg: It’s going to be great.
Jacquelyn Cobb: Yes. And yeah, so finally we have our stories one and two, which were about the same topic basically. And it is a move, a push by career entrepreneur Lou Weisbach, who is trying to start the American Center for Cures. And basically, that’s a push to get the US Government, the US Department of the Treasury to sell off 750 billion in bonds over six years to fund this American Center for Cures as basically a new paradigm in cancer research and other disease research funding. That’s focused exclusively on cures and prevention, not treatments. And the idea is that you treat curing diseases like a business.
So there is usually a business type expert who has proven their ability to cross the finish line, and they are recruited or tasked with recruiting scientists in their disease, and their job is to cure this disease. And if they don’t cure the disease, there’s, quote unquote, “accountability.” So they might get a warning. They might get removed from the position. So yeah, it’s turning the whole process of cancer research and biomedical research on its head, where it’s a lot more accountability, a lot more like a business and a lot less like typical NIH research.
Paul Goldberg: Like [inaudible 00:06:38], yeah. [inaudible 00:06:41]. That one, we should probably just focus on that for a moment. So that’s a very interesting idea that Lou Weisbach, who’s a former CEO, and Richard Boxer, who is a urologist and a member of NCAB, came up with 25 years ago. But the idea is, I guess the depth of it is, the deepest way of looking at is, if the system that we have in oncology… And this thing is beyond oncology, but if the system that we have now working in oncology were to be built today, it would look very, very different from what it is right now. Which is true because it’s a system that evolved. It’s not an argument.
But what these guys are suggesting, and they suggested that again 25 years ago, was to design something that is more driven to produce outcomes, as opposed to study the thing. Which is also an interesting way of looking at it. Years ago, Don Coffey at Hopkins used to say, and I’m going to clean this up a little bit because our platforms do not allow us to use the language he used, but what Don used to say, “Are you studying the thing or are you trying to cure? Are you trying to study this thing? Are you trying to cure this thing?” Meaning cancer, but he didn’t use the word cancer.
Jacquelyn Cobb: Yes.
Paul Goldberg: He used the word that rhymes with trucker.
Jacquelyn Cobb: A little more colorful.
Paul Goldberg: Yeah, yeah. He was a colorful guy. But that is really the issue here. Are you trying to study the thing? Are you trying to cure the thing? And the objective really is to come up with a system that more driven towards producing something similar to an iPhone. You couldn’t produce an iPhone, equivalent of an iPhone with a healthcare system. We have now, there’s a question that’s at the heart of it all, which is that iPhone, just like the moonshot for that matter, is about engineering. All the science has been done. I’m not sure there’s anyone in the right mind who would suggest that all the science has been done in oncology or really in biomedical science, biomedical research. So you still need NIH and you still need biomedical research.
Jacquelyn Cobb: Yeah. Well, that’s what he said. He said that he envisions this at least as being complementary to NIH.
Paul Goldberg: Yeah. And if a very large amount of money goes into all of this in order to restructure the system, and if it’s kept apolitical, which is important. If it actually produces results, then my God, then that would be fantastic. Even people who haven’t, several people I spoke with who are looking at the idea de novo really, are saying, “Well, that certainly deserves to be heard.” And that’s what we try to do. We try to give Lou an opportunity to tell the story to everyone who reads The Cancer Letter, which is not a small number of people, and mostly in academic oncology, pharma, and the government. But he has certainly presented his case. I tried to do it a little bit differently, maybe we should talk about that?
Jacquelyn Cobb: Yeah, your story with Otis?
Paul Goldberg: Yeah. Well you wrote the main story, which brought it all in one place, put it all together. And what I wanted to do was to take it beyond that. And as a journalist, I limit myself when it comes to opining, just to spare the sensibilities of our readers. So what I did was I actually brought in, deputized a real expert in the field who actually can opine. And that’s Otis Brawley. So we deputized him to be a journalist. So Otis and I did the interview with Lou, conducted that, and that actually came out quite nicely.
Jacquelyn Cobb: Yeah. [inaudible 00:12:00].
Paul Goldberg: So I was just provoking and Otis was opining, and Lou was answering questions. And actually, Otis was asking questions as well. It was just nice to have a deeper perspective than one I would generally provide.
Jacquelyn Cobb: Yeah, definitely. And I think, I mean, Otis pushed back a little bit because obviously there are some things about this that are just important to note. Like you said, the basic science is even beyond basic, including translational science is not done on oncology. You can’t just stop that and just focus on cures. Well, I mean, again, it’s different, right? You want to focus on cures, but you need to have that science.
The other example that Lou Weisbach brought up was the COVID vaccine. And it’s the same idea, right? It’s like, “Wow, we could get this done in seven months and it normally takes at least 10 years, et cetera, et cetera.” But the idea there also, and I think Otis actually brought this up in the Q&A, was that same thing. The science had already been done. We had been studying mRNA vaccines for at least 10 years before that. We had been studying COVID, other strands of COVID, strains of COVID.
Paul Goldberg: [inaudible 00:13:14].
Jacquelyn Cobb: So we had all of this ready to go. And then it was this engineering feat more. And again, maybe engineering isn’t quite the right word, but it was more this-
Paul Goldberg: It is engineering. No, that’s exactly the word.
Jacquelyn Cobb: Almost like implementation, you know? Because I think it’s still-
Paul Goldberg: Engineering.
Jacquelyn Cobb: Yeah. But it’s that side of it. And I think that what Lou is saying is that there are situations like that in oncology and in other diseases that, why wouldn’t we try to get those off the shelf or into the actual market for patients? But obviously that can’t be where oncology research and other biomedical research ends.
Paul Goldberg: Yeah. No, my concern was that the NIH would be killed with friendly fire here.
Jacquelyn Cobb: Yeah, yeah.
Paul Goldberg: But let’s go back a little bit to 1971 and the National Cancer Act. The National Cancer Act, showed broadly that it is possible to buy ideas with money. So more money, more ideas is probably not inaccurate. And lots of people were saying that money does not buy ideas in 1971, as they campaigned against this silly legislation in Washington. But really, most of the science that we have now came from that.
Jacquelyn Cobb: Yeah.
Paul Goldberg: And so it was a big promise and possibly a waste of money in some cases-
Jacquelyn Cobb: Really?
Paul Goldberg: … people were saying. Well, yeah, it seemed that way at that time. Short term, it’s a waste of money. But money spent by the government to pursue… It was also the first time that a country declared war on the disease and created structures that are the envy of the rest of biomedical research. Now Lou is looking beyond cancer. He’s looking at things like diabetes and so forth. But really, human genius filled in that gap between the promise of science and the actual science. And engineering follows. It’s kind of interesting, it was Al Gilman who said that to me a number of times, which is “Things become clear as engineering problems after you’ve solved the problem. Before you’ve solved the problem, it’s a scientific evolutionary problem.” Cancer is an evolutionary problem.
Jacquelyn Cobb: Yeah, totally. Totally.
Paul Goldberg: So it’ll be very interesting to see. But also, I hate to be weaving around here, and I know I’m weaving. If you buy ideas, if you’re in the business of buying ideas, $750 billion will buy a lot of really good ideas.
Jacquelyn Cobb: Yeah.
Paul Goldberg: Which is an unprecedented amount. And it’s not unprecedented to fund cancer research through bonds. What is CPRIT if not a bond-funded institute in Texas?
Jacquelyn Cobb: Yeah, yeah.
Paul Goldberg: So it can be done. [inaudible 00:16:50].
Jacquelyn Cobb: Yeah, yeah. And I think, like you said, American Center for Cures is not new, it’s over two decades old. But it’s really gaining traction right now as NIH is facing this existential threat from Washington and people are looking for potentially other types of funding mechanisms.
Paul Goldberg: Well, the idea existed in the ether and on paper, but it doesn’t exist until money [inaudible 00:17:23].
Jacquelyn Cobb: Well, yeah. I mean as much as it exists now, it existed then.
Paul Goldberg: Well, Lou’s view is that he wants to take it over to the White House, at this point. And if it becomes the Trump Center for Cures, well something good will come of it.
Jacquelyn Cobb: Yeah. And I think it was Steve Rosen who said, “If anybody can get this done, it’s Lou.” So that’s a very… When Steve Rosen says that, you listen.
Paul Goldberg: Well, yeah. And interestingly, one of the big winners in all of this, and this is getting back to the engineering questions, is the Cancer Centers Informatics Society. So the AI center of this whole [inaudible 00:18:19] would get many, many billions of dollars.
Jacquelyn Cobb: Yeah, 180.
Paul Goldberg: So that would buy a lot of science or engineering or what have you. It’s got to buy something.
Jacquelyn Cobb: Yeah.
Paul Goldberg: Actually, it’s interesting because I spent a lot of time writing about caBIG, years ago, which was an NCI structure that was going to… AI is not the right word, but data science structure that NCI launched years and years ago under Andy Van Eschenbach. And that was how [inaudible 00:18:59] was going to cure cancer [inaudible 00:19:01] and suffering and death due to cancer by 2015, which didn’t happen. But recently, I was actually speaking at a meeting of Ci4CC, which is the Cancer Center’s Informatics Society. And somebody asked me, “Was that all a waste of time?” And I looked around and saw all these people who are really involved in the field that didn’t exist before CaBIG. And I said, “Huh.” I kind of changed my mind right there and then. And I had to say no.
In any other setting, I would’ve probably said yes, because I wouldn’t have seen it. But there I saw it. Here’s a bunch of people at major cancer centers, who are doing data science. And that will change a lot. And that is because the government wasted, you might use the word wasted, it was about $350 million boondoggle, or was it? Maybe not.
Jacquelyn Cobb: No, yeah.
Paul Goldberg: There are a lot of mini boondoggles that followed the National Cancer Act of 1971, which actually turned out not to be boondoggles at all.
Jacquelyn Cobb: Yeah.
Paul Goldberg: I mean, people were talking about viral oncology program being rife with favoritism, poor contracting, and whatever other nonsense. But we wouldn’t have immunotherapy if not for that cancer viral oncology program.
Jacquelyn Cobb: Right.
Paul Goldberg: So yeah, it does take shaking things up and it does take money. And if they shake things up and come up with some money, something very good could come of it at what looks like a really bad time. The worst time that’s ever been.
Jacquelyn Cobb: I think we’ve covered a lot. There’s a lot more in the story. Lou was telling me about how they’ve extended an olive branch to pharma. We talked to Ci4CC, Ci4CC’s Sorena Nadaf, so there’s a lot more in the two stories to explore, for sure. So definitely don’t end your consumption of this topic here. But is there anything else you wanted touch on, on the podcast, Paul?
Paul Goldberg: No. I think we’ve really covered the whole thing. It was an exciting week.
Jacquelyn Cobb: Yes.
Paul Goldberg: A great time to be a journalist
Jacquelyn Cobb: As always. All right. Thanks, Paul. See you next week.
Thank you for joining us on The Cancer Letter Podcast, where we explore the stories shaping the future of oncology. For more in-depth reporting and analysis, visit us at cancerletter.com. With over 200 site license subscriptions, you may already have access through your workplace. If you found this episode valuable, don’t forget to subscribe, rate, and share. Together, we’ll keep the conversation going.
Paul Goldberg: Until next time, stay informed, stay engaged, and thank you for listening.
