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For nearly 25 years, business executive Lou Weisbach and urologist Richard J. Boxer have argued that finding the money to finance the cures for devastating diseases is not as difficult as it appears.
To start finding the cures, the U.S. Department of the Treasury needs to issue some bonds—$750 billion worth. Next, you hire CEOs—one for each disease—and give them the tools and the elbow room to pursue the cures.
Weisbach is the founder and former CEO of Ha-Lo, a promotional products company, and was chairman of the Jefferson Trust, a group of the largest donors to the Democratic Party, during the Clinton Administration. Boxer is a urologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, David Geffen School of Medicine and a member of the National Cancer Advisory Board.
The project, called the American Center for Cures, was dormant for most of its 25-year history. However, now, with government-funded biomedical research under attack from the Trump administration, the idea is starting to get traction in the oncology circles and in Washington.
“Any successful venture has to have enough money, has to have the right leadership, has to have the right business model, has to have a sense of accountability, and has to have a sense of urgency,” Weisbach said to The Cancer Letter. “My point is that with the right leadership, with the right command and control and the right vision, and being prepared, and we’ve got all, to Otis’s point before, we’ve got all these years of preparation that we’ve gone through to put the pieces in place, but we’ve never connected the pieces.
“And we’ve never had the money to connect the pieces, or the people with the responsibility and accountability to do that—that’s what we’re bringing to the table. So, I would say anything can happen here, anything can be done.”
Weisbach said he is hoping to present the idea to the Trump administration.
“We are taking it to the White House,” Weisbach said. “We know a lot of people that are close to the president, obviously. We worked on COVID and got to the president on COVID at the time, and we’ll get to the president.
“And the real issue at the end of the day is that the president looks at things in a certain way, as anybody does, as we all get older. We are who we are, we look at things the way we look at things. I believe that the way he looks at things, he views himself as a great problem-solver, he views himself as somebody that can do things that nobody else could have ever done. This is one of those things.
“And I think we give him the tools to get it done.”
Weisbach spoke with Otis Brawley, Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Oncology and Epidemiology at the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center of Johns Hopkins University, and Paul Goldberg, editor and publisher of The Cancer Letter.
The conversation is also available as a video.
Paul Goldberg: Good morning. With us today, we have Lou Weisbach and Otis Brawley. Lou has an idea, a bold idea, that’s 25 years old, but its time may have come, and our hope is to be able to discuss it.
And also Otis Brawley, who has been deputized to be a reporter. By day he is a professor at Hopkins, the Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Oncology and Epidemiology.
So, let’s talk. I guess we should just begin with Lou.
What’s the idea for The American Center for Cures?
Lou Weisbach: It’s actually quite simple. The idea for the American Center for Cures was born out of the concept of, if the only thing we wanted to do as a business model was to prevent or cure people from getting sick, how would we go about that process? What would we put into place?
If we had a blank sheet of paper, how would we fill in the dots? And so, a bunch of us got together, including a lot of Dr. Brawley’s friends, and said, “Let’s put this to paper.”
And we realized that the things that are necessary for success in any venture—none of them existed in the world of prevention and cure.
And what were those elements?
The elements are that any successful venture has to have enough money, has to have the right leadership, has to have the right business model, has to have a sense of accountability, and has to have a sense of urgency.
And so, we put together [what] ultimately became a bipartisan bill in Congress, we put together the concept of the American Center for Cures, which brought all of those five weapons to bear to finally get the job done. So, that was the origination of it.
And so, what does the American Center for Cures represent in terms of the actual content of how this takes place?
Sixteen separate entities, 14 entities that deal with individual diseases, like Parkinson’s, like Alzheimer’s, like pancreatic cancer, like breast cancer, heart disease, mental illness, and each of these entities has $36 billion of funding. So, that’s where the funding piece and the full funding comes in.
Each one would have a CEO, whose only job was to, within a six-year timeframe, prevent and/or cure the disease that he or she was leading to get the job done with.
Each entity would have its own business model, its own business plan.Each entity would have a pure sense of accountability.
So, no longer would there be this open-ended model relative to, let’s try this, let’s try that, let’s spend $2 billion on this, because we might get some answers.
There’s accountability, there’s a real business model, a real business plan that’s set up before the case, and in that business model, the question is, “What do we need to cross the finish line, taking all the great research that’s been done in the past, the accumulated wisdom, the great scientists we have in America, how do we put them all together in a model to finally cross the finish line?”
And if we have people within this organization that aren’t getting the job done, they lose their job. Accountability.
How much money are we talking about overall? And where does it come from?
Lou Weisbach: So, we’re talking about $750 billion, and it comes through the passage of legislation, for the Treasury to sell $750 billion of bonds over a six-year period. So, per year, over the six years, it’s $125 billion in bonds.
But I think the exciting part of this is the economic elements of it.It means, simplified, that in the first year, the American government will spend $6 billion in the first year toward this in interest only.
So, think about it this way, with the cuts that the president has recently made, we will be able to have over a term, a real plan, with real organizations, with real accountability for less money per year in the beginning than the cuts that have already been made.
But the ultimate result will be that once whatever successes we have will actually cut the federal deficit, because the amount of money that we would be saving if, just as an example, if the only thing we did was prevent or cure diabetes, the savings would be a trillion dollars, plus annualized, and growing, every year going forward.
So, we spent $6 billion in the first year to do that, and $12 billion the second, and 18 the third.
And we saved the government trillions, not to mention human suffering, not to mention all the other diseases that are caused by diabetes. So, it’s exciting, because this administration, no matter how you feel about them, it has shown that—and I think the border’s a good example—that they are able to look at things with a very high degree of open-mindedness, relative to what they’re willing to do to solve a problem.
And, agree or not agree with a lot of the things they’re doing, certainly the border, nobody would’ve ever believed that we’d be able to shut the border down, which effectively we have, literally within weeks.
Well, now let’s take that to a much more important issue—to disease. And so, we now have the plan, a very logical financial plan, and especially with what’s going on with the budget.
The question isn’t when should we do this or should we do this, but how can we not do this and how can we not do it now? And what I would say is the beauty of the response over the last three or four weeks from the medical community and the research community has been remarkable to me as somebody who’s worked on this for a long time.
People get it. People get that we haven’t gotten the job done, and not because we don’t have great people working on it, but we’re in a system that doesn’t work.
All right. I can opine on this all day and nobody would want to listen to that. So, let’s ask Dr. Brawley, what do you think of this idea?
Otis Brawley: Well, I’ve actually been saying for quite some time, probably 20 plus years, that we need to find an alternative way to fund cancer research, which is what I know best.
But I think health research in general, since Nixon signed the National Cancer Act in 1971, that spurred a great deal of research grants from the NIH to academia, primarily. Most of those grants were investigator-initiated grants, and a great deal has been learned from that, especially in the cancer world.
But there’s been spinoffs in the other diseases, and that spinoff thing is the thing that I think, Lou, we have to make sure that we don’t lose. When you start funding these siloed diseases, there’s going to be things that come up in cancer that will help us in rheumatoid arthritis, or help us with ulcerative colitis, and other diseases that we need to make sure we harvest.
But getting back to the point, what happened in the 1970s was the National Cancer Institute director was supposed to be director of the National Cancer Program.
What’s often not talked about, was late in the 1970s, legislation was passed that really weakened the NCI director as director of the National Cancer Program, he or she was no longer a czar for cancer with control. He or she ended up coordinating with a small C.
I think what we need is someone who actually, we need a general, we need a Marshall, General Marshall, who orchestrated the logistics and the organization of World War II. I hate the war analogy in cancer generally, but I’m going to say, I’m going to use it this time, that we need somebody who has command and control and that coordination.
So much of our research now is investigator-initiated research, that is one project, it’s not really guided in any way. So, Lou, thank you for the idea of how to get the money. I guess I’m focused more on how you’re going to organize and spend the money.
PG: Do you have any thoughts on how to do that? By the way, just as a historical note, the Marshall Plan is postwar, so-
OB: No, no, no, no. But General Marshall during the war was Eisenhower and MacArthur’s commander. I’m talking about that part.
Okay. But let’s talk about postwar. And in this war, are we going to lose NIH to friendly fire?
LW: So, I have a long-winded answer to all of this. And first of all, I so agree with everything Dr. Brawley said. And I should, in all fairness, point out that one of the first advocates of this many, many, many years ago is Dr. Brawley. And so, I want to thank him for that, first of all, and his vision. So let’s talk about this.
OB: Let’s call me Otis instead of Dr. Brawley too.
LW: Oh, you know what? I’ve always called you Otis, but I’ve noticed that the other gentleman on this call always calls you Dr. Brawley. So, I wanted to be respectful, especially as the real lay person on this call, I wanted to make sure I treated you with proper respect.
PG: That’s because we’re close friends. I think it’s hilarious to call him Dr. Brawley. It’s something of a private joke.
LW: Well, I feel like I’m part of the circle now.
PG: Absolutely.
LW: So, I’ve got the joke. So to Otis’s point, and I’ll take you back to what I said before, in terms of who are the generals that are going to be running this.
Our model is that we bring in the best and brightest historical CEOs in America, who have proven that they could take on the biggest issues and challenges and cross the finish line, and that’s their expertise.
I was a public CEO, I wouldn’t put myself in the category of the people I’m talking about. But I gave a speech the other day and I said, “How confident would you be if the CEO of Apple became in charge of wiping Parkinson’s off the face of the earth? And if you gave him the appropriate amount of money and tools to get the job done?”
And to a person, when I use that concept, they go, we’d be really confident.
But that’s the point that Otis makes that’s so perfect here.
We’ve got to have the leadership and all the five elements. And I think that’s the point we have to drive home whenever all of us talk about this, we have to have all the five elements that you need to be successful.
But having the general in each group is very important.
The other point that Otis brought up was the connectivity between all diseases, and that you can’t, even though we’re going to have 16 separate units, you need to have that connectivity.
And so, how is that going to be achieved?
The largest unit is going to be the data and AI unit, and that unit is going to be working with all 15 units. And so, that’s the unit, that’s the Krazy Glue in this model that brings all the parts together.
They’re going to know what’s working in one group in terms of AI, in terms of data, and going to be able to bring them together.
And the other way that we’re going to do that is that the 16 CEOs that we’re going to have are going to meet on a regular basis to discuss exactly what Otis is bringing up, to make sure that they explain to their counterparts what’s worked, what’s not working, so that they can use the accumulated knowledge that they all have through this effort to work together to cross the finish line.
PG: So the question stands: “Are we going to kill NIH with friendly fire?”
LW: So, my answer to that is simple. And I do have to tell you that in interviews I’ve done recently, that’s come up in every interview, absolutely at every interview.
And what my answer is, but I’m really not the right person to [direct] that question to. But I’ve met with NIH, I met with Francis [Collins] for two hours, we discussed this at length.
Francis said, “This is absolutely the right thing. This is what we ought to be doing. But the ultimate financial answer is that, what is NIH’s part in this?”
And what I would suggest is that what NIH does is not what the American Center for Cures is going to do. So, in my view, NIH has historically done a lot of great things.
One of the things it hasn’t done is preventing and curing disease, in terms of crossing the finish line and getting the job done. So, if this were my decision, my decision would be, let’s continue NIH on the great work they do, let’s give them the tools that they need, but let’s make sure that their focus is clear, and let’s see how they can work collaboratively with the American Center for Cures.
That’s what my answer would be. But again, that’s definitely above my pay grade.
PG: Otis, if let’s say you were a cancer czar, would you know what to do? Are we at a point where you can implement the National Cancer Act through findings? It is, have we won the war, and you’re now running the Marshall Plan?
OB: Yes.
Well, let me use another historical example. When John F. Kennedy said we’re going to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade, all the basic science had been done.
And it became an engineering project, you just had to assemble the science. To a certain extent, in cancer, a lot of the science has been done—not all of it. And that’s where the NIH still is very important.
But engineering, or putting together what already has been discovered, and applying it, some people would call this implementation, or the application of the knowledge that we have, could help us a great deal.
I actually have done calculations that if every American got what all Americans should be getting right now for cancer in terms of, and this is not just curing stage four disease, this is appropriate prevention, appropriate screening, appropriate diagnostics and appropriate treatment, we would have 130,000 to 132,000 less cancer deaths per year in the United States right now.
By the way, there’s 600,000 people who die from cancer every year, and I just said if we applied what we already have, 22% would not die.
PG: So, you would know what to do?
OB: I would have some good ideas.
Now, I do want to set some goals. I don’t think we’re going to cure cancer, any cancer, in six years, but I think we could do a great deal to lower the death rate even more than we have now.
We could do really well.
But to say there will be no more pancreatic cancer, there will be no more lung cancer, prostate cancer, I think that’s a little too far. To say that we could reduce the death rate by 20 or 30%, I think that’s very achievable.
LW: So, with all due respect to what Otis is saying, and he again has much more expertise in this world, but I will tell you a practical thing that happened in my life.
I started a company in an industry that now has 25,000 companies in the United States. And I tried to take the company public, and the heads of every major investment bank in America, Goldman Sachs, I mean the people who should know the answer to that, much like Otis has, much more educated feelings relative to this issue.
The heads of Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, and at the time Credit Suisse, they all said, “You can’t take your idea and take it public because you’re in a business that has, really...that’s all you have is a bunch of salespeople. And how can you take a business public that’s just a group of salespeople?”
And I said to them, “I believe we can, and I believe we can build the biggest branding company in the world. And here’s how...”
And everybody in the financial community said it can’t be done.
And so what I would say is, I call it the dare-to-dream theory, I said, “Don’t tell me how things can’t be done, let’s work together and let’s dare to dream.”
And if you think about this for one second, Otis, in the world that you’re in, you’ve looked at things and investigated things in a certain way. But now we have AI in addition to all of that, and we have certain capabilities that we don’t know where they’re going, and we don’t know how far they can take us.
And I would also say, “Let’s look at the COVID vaccine, and let’s look at how something that normally took seven years took seven months.” Now, whether or not it was totally safe when it came out is another conversation. But why were they able to do that scientifically quicker than historically done?
Number One, because the money was there. Number Two, the sense of urgency was there. Number Three, the sense of profitability was there. And the job got done, even though people would not have thought it was possible.
If I talked to members of Congress about closing the border down in two weeks, they all would’ve said to me, and I spoke to many of them, it’s an impossibility. The size of our border was too large, we’ve been trying to do whatever we could, and it just can’t be done.
Well, guess what?
The border basically got shut down. So, the point I would make is that I’m not somebody that believes that there’s anything that can’t be done. I believe things can be done.
And especially because of all the great groundwork that’s been done by our scientific community and our researchers, and people like Otis, that we’ve now got the framework. And just like what you just said, Otis, you said that you can see right now that even as we sit today that we can, if we just do X, Y, and Z in a coordinated way, we can stop 20% of the deaths in America attributed to cancer.
Now, we’re able to do that without having a system that brings everything that we need to bear to cross the finish line and be truly successful. So, how do we know what we can get done? We don’t know.
We don’t know what can get done, the truth is, we don’t. And so, when you add our expertise and our leadership, but you add AI and the fact that we’ve never done before, we’re going to have people who are empowered and have the money to do everything they can to cross the finish line.
And I say this all the time, the Apple phone, if the CEO of Apple did not have those five elements, none of us would be on an iPhone today. We just wouldn’t be. If they had just said, “Oh, I don’t see how, how could you possibly have a phone?”
If I sat down with you 30 years ago and said, “I dream of there being a phone that has everything that your phone and my phone and Paul’s phone has, those capabilities,” you’d have looked at me and said, “I’m not sure where Lou’s from, but he’s probably from someplace further out than Mars.”
But that’s the reality of how, because we had never done anything like that and never tried it, never had the funding and the vision and the openmindedness, but we had a dream and a goal, we were able to achieve that.
And people in the early 1990s were talking about exactly what we have now, and they were told that the concept of what we look at as an iPhone today is an impossibility.
With this individual piece, to have that accumulated knowledge, which was more than all of our supercomputers at that time had in combination was deemed to be literally an impossibility.
Well, guess what? All of us, Otis lives on this and Paul lives on this, and almost everything that our lives are built around are on this little device in my hand right now.
So, I would say, I respect what Otis is saying, but I don’t necessarily agree with what he’s saying, because I think whatever we deemed as possible before is really different in the new world. And especially by doing something that we’ve never done before and having vision to do something we’ve never done before.
PG: Well, let me stand up for Otis here. I’m defending you, Otis.
LW: When you started standing up, why did you sit back down?
PG: So, the reason we are here is not to explain why what you’re suggesting cannot be done, so this is not an exercise in naysaying. We wouldn’t be talking if this were naysaying.
I mean, what we’re here to do is to present an idea that needs to be heard, which is your idea. And when you lift up the cell phone, you’re really still talking about engineering.
What Otis is saying is something entirely different, which is we know a certain number of things, and if we implement all those things, 132,000 deaths would be prevented out of 600,000 possible. So, that’s that.
And then also to just bring in one more piece, which speaks for what Lou is saying, I was just talking with folks at Ci4CC, the Cancer Center Informatics Society, and they’re about as happy as anyone can be to see this go forward. So, I’m kind of going in three different directions, and yet can we kind of bring it all together.
OB: Well, can I just say, Lou used the best example I can think of.
And it’s really, let’s take what I said about Kennedy and the space program and let’s apply it to COVID. Much of what happened in COVID, we had a coronavirus infection, the virus was sequenced in November of 2019, three weeks after it was discovered, the sequence was published in January of 2020.
An mRNA vaccine, I should say, was developed within a year. All of that was done because of science that was done in the 1970s, 1980s, the ability to sequence, the understanding of messenger RNA.
Many Nobel Prizes were awarded for the technology that was developed in the seventies, eighties, nineties, and early two thousands, that all were put together very quickly in 2020 to develop the COVID vaccine.
Now, I happen to think the COVID vaccine was very well-developed and very well researched, and I even have research to show that it prevented two million people from dying in the United States, and we don’t even have a good estimate of how many it prevented from dying around the world.
But we’re talking about the same thing. We’re talking about basic science that came out of the NIH mostly, that ultimately becomes put together by somebody who understands how to organize things, who feels that pressure, that urgency, but also has command and control.
I think that was called Operation Warp Speed, and they got people from the Army Materiel Command as well as the NIH to put together the vaccine so quickly. And corporate involvement from BioNTech and Moderna and Pfizer and others.
PG: And if I were to add another curveball to this-
LW: Just a second, Paul, why don’t you just throw some fastballs?
PG: In the 1970s, the science that Otis was talking about is the NCI viral oncology program, which was some said a complete boondoggle. Which it turned out not to be.
How do we bring it all together to the American Center for Cures? Maybe we should just ask Otis how to do this, Lou, maybe we can just both attack him on this. How would you do this job if you were to apply for this job for being the cancer czar under the American Center for Cures? How would that be done?
OB: Well, I think that the person who gets the job has to have a vision and an understanding of the system that we currently have, and how that system can be changed to accelerate science and implementation of that science.
I also think that that person needs to have the ability to give orders or instruction, that means actually discretionary money to put out contracts and other things, if we’re working within the current government system of contracts and grants.
PG: So, it’s ARPA-H with money. Is what we’re talking about?
OB: That’s right. It also involves entities that we don’t normally think of as being involved in the scientific process. I mean, we need to get into hospitals in the community, we need to get into beyond the university hospitals, we need clinicians involved, we need educators involved.
Part of how we overcome the cancer problem in the United States is we fix third grade, and we teach kids and their parents what kids need to be eating, and exercise, and appropriate things. And that’s when you get kids to prevent them from smoking.
Kids who go to college in the United States have a smoking rate that’s far lower than kids who don’t go to college, and they end up having a death rate in their sixties and seventies of cancer that’s far lower than kids who don’t go to college.
And it’s not the fact that they went to college, it’s the fact that they had a childhood that put them on a trajectory to get to college. So, I’m a big advocate not just for curing the disease once it’s there, although I’m an advocate for that, I’m a big advocate for preventing the disease to begin with.
PG: So, does Otis know the job, Lou? Do you hire him?
LW: Well, let me go to that point.
First of all, I totally agree with Otis that if I had a choice between prevention and cure, I’ll take prevention, every day of the week. So, that’s point number one.
Point number two, because I want to make sure there’s clarity on the executional piece of this vision so we are not going to be another government entity—this is going to be in the private sector.
That’s important to understand. The CEO of this company is not going to have to go through government regulation in what the bidding processes are, how we have to spend the money. They’re going to be able to be like I was and what I was, if I wanted to spend $10 billion on X, Y, and Z, I could do whatever I wanted to do because it was my responsibility.
So, if you think the head of Apple had to do that to develop this phone, this phone would never have been developed, had to go through all kinds of red tape to get things done. That’s why the diligence is done when you decide who’s going to run each of these organizations.
But each one of them is going to have command and control, period, end of sentence.
And I would say that if you look at what happened in, and I hate to use this, but I think it’s true, if you think of what happened in the Middle East in the last three days with what Israel did, and I’m not being political or talking about right and wrong here, but what they did militarily in Iran.
If I had said to you, how could anybody possibly do what they did in a few hours, you would’ve said, “There’s not a chance in the world.”
I mean, how could anybody do that?
So, my point is that with the right leadership, with the right command and control and the right vision, and being prepared, and we’ve got all, to Otis’s point before, we’ve got all these years of preparation that we’ve gone through to put the pieces in place, but we’ve never connected the pieces.
And we’ve never had the money to connect the pieces, or the people with the responsibility and accountability to do that—that’s what we’re bringing to the table. So, I would say anything can happen here, anything can be done.
The idea that Otis is saying that even given what we have today, we can save 20% of American lives from cancer, today, that he acknowledges, I think that’s a great starting point. I mean, how major is that? How fantastic is that?
And now, when you take that a step further and say, “Now let’s go to the next step.”
And now the former head of NCI said, and leaders in the scientific community have been saying this since we began, Rick Boxer and I began talking about this, said, “We believe there’s hundreds of cures on the shelf, but there’s nobody putting the pieces together.”
I mean, that’s been a old line within the industry. Well, you know what? It’s time for that line to end and for progress to begin. And we have the process that makes sense. And there’s really, again, how can we not do this? It’s going to save the government a boatload of money. And we’ve built it in a way that’s great for the pharmaceutical industry, which is an important element to this.
And nobody’s talking about it.
Including pharmaceutical pricing of things that aren’t preventative and aren’t curative, because we’re going to come up with $750 billion worth of research, with things that you could never have imagined, that are from a daily perspective, not curative or preventively, but from a daily perspective make the American’s lives better.
So, this has so many implications.
And, by the way, because we’re going to license these to pharma, pharma will have no cost to get these done except licensing fees, that impacts the cost of delivering these things to the American public and brings the price of pharmaceuticals down.
So, this is not something that was developed without a very in-depth thought process of how this works well for everybody. It works well for the pharmaceutical industry, it works well for every patient in America. It works well for the dedicated people like Otis who’ve been working their entire lives to get things done, and now brings the real hope to make a giant leap forward.
OB: Well, can I just add, it’s going to actually stimulate the economy as well by doing additional research and hiring more people.
One thing that I would, a plea I would have that as we embark on this, we’re also going to have to change some things, like some of our IRB regulations that actually slow down the conduct of clinical trials especially.
But some research right now is slowed because of red tape and because of bureaucracy, and we’ll have to cut some of that out. We still want to maintain the safety aspects of it, of course, but we need to make sure we can do the research faster.
PG: There’s no sense, there’s no rationale for why some therapies move forward while others do not.
And the other thing is, do you see funding basic research and clinical research through this? Do you see funding bioinformatics through this? What are you funding through? What are you going to do with your $700 and something billion?
LW: So, good question, but easy to answer.
So, it is all going to be at the discretion of each CEO. So, there’s 16 separate decision-makers who decide, because at the end of the day, they’ve got accountability to all of us to get the job done.
And many of them, Tim Cook might look at it one way, but another CEO might look at it another way, that’s really going to be up to them. As far as AI goes, there’s going to be a totally separate entity that has $108 billion, and they can spend it any way they want to spend it.
And they’re going to be working with each of the other 15 groups, just relative to AI and how they can speed the path to success through the use of AI.
PG: I haven’t taken an econ course in forty-some years. How does the bond issue work in this case?
LW: It’s as simple as could be.
I mean, if tomorrow we wanted to raise, if the federal government wanted to raise $750 billion behind the full faith and credit of the American government, you could go to Goldman Sachs, you can go to anybody, these could be sold almost instantly into the marketplace. There’s the demand for that.
If we had a blank sheet of paper, how would we fill in the dots? And so, a bunch of us got together, including a lot of Dr. Brawley’s friends, and said, ‘Let’s put this to paper.’ And we realized that the things that are necessary for success in any venture—none of them existed in the world of prevention and cure.
So, it’s very simple, I hate to say this, it’s incredibly simple. But the issue is that we have to, as a society, get together and realize what the opportunity is. And in order to make this happen, we can’t make this happen unless the American public, who by the way, all members of Congress and the president works for, are aware of this opportunity and stand up and demand that we do this. And I think this is really important.
Disease is the single issue that is the same whether you’re Black or white, rich or poor, Democrat or Republican, it hits everybody in the exact same way.
And Elon Musk, it doesn’t matter how much money you have, but if you get stage four pancreatic cancer tomorrow, there’s a good chance you aren’t going to have a good ending.
And it doesn’t matter if you’re living on the street, the same thing is true.
And so, part of the beauty of this effort, I believe, is in the country that’s more divided now than I’ve ever seen it, and I would assume that both of you would agree, it’s something that can heal the country, both physically, spiritually, and politically.
And I think that’s a wonderful thing for us to grab. And I think if the American public understands that, we’re all dying to have, instead of watching what we watch on television every day, the idea that instead of all these people picketing and marching and throwing everything that’s going on, just think if we have marches to bring the American Center for Cures together, because it affects us all the exact same way. The exact same way.
And I think that’s really exciting.
The other thing I wanted to mention is that one of the other financial concepts of this is that the results that we come up with cannot be something for wealthy people only.
And so, the underlying concept of this is that whatever we come up with in terms of, let’s say a product that can, let’s say we do come up with something that ends diabetes, just as an example, that would be owned from a technical point of view by the American public, because it’s the American public that is really financing this.
At the end of the day, it’s the money that they provide the federal government in taxes, et cetera, and so, everybody would have the same entitlement to what we come up with.
And I think that’s a really important element to this.
PG: So, we happen to have with us an expert in health disparities.
OB: Yes. I’ve often said that the biggest reason for health disparities is a large number of people don’t get the adequate care from prevention all the way through appropriate screening, appropriate diagnostics, and treatment.
And any effort to make it cheaper, make it easier to disseminate, in the world of CAR T right now, you can only do CAR T in the high-end hospitals, the big university, tertiary care hospitals.
I’d love to see us to be able to do some of these treatments in the community setting.
We’ve actually disseminated some bone marrow transplant from the university hospitals through the community setting over the last 25 years. That’s an example, we need to do more of that.
And I actually think that the more we understand about cancer, the more we’re going to be able to prevent it. To get back to the prevention thing, the more we understand about cancer, the more we’re going to be able to develop drugs to interfere with some of the molecular mechanisms within the cancer cell.
That’s the tyrosine kinase inhibitors and things that we already have, and we’re going to need more of those. And if we can just make those things more widely available by making them less expensive, we’re going to get rid of a lot of the disparities. AI, by the way, can also be very useful in helping doctors to apply medical knowledge to each individual patient. Let’s not forget that as well.
PG: So this idea is 25 years old, it’s been dormant on occasion. What brings it forward? And what are you going to do next? How do you make it happen?
LW: So, what I would say is that as someone who’s worked on this with Rick Boxer for 25 years, we’ve made more progress in the last four weeks than we’ve made in 25 years.
And we’ve made progress not because of anything that we’ve done, we’ve made progress because the research community in America suddenly had a moment of reckoning in terms of a concern about where their dollars are coming from for the future.
And they almost in a remarkable way, at ASCO, people were lining up to hear what I was talking about, which I’ve never had that experience, frankly, and people wanted to meet me and hear the story. And so all of a sudden there’s a sense of urgency in the research community in particular. And that’s been a blessing in disguise.
It’s been a blessing in disguise, because all of a sudden our concept, our vision is going center stage.
And as the solution, not only for researchers, not only for patients, but as something that we should have done 25 years ago. And that’s really a good thing.
But I believe that if we can get this messaging out there to the public, and if people like Otis and Rick Boxer and Paul have the same story, and when I say the same story, I’m just talking about the story of process, I’m talking about the story of why haven’t we gone further.
And I think all of us on this call would agree that part of it has been a process issue.
And the American Center for Cures idea brings that to bear, brings the process that is time tested in business of how you get things done, how you reach for the stars, the elements you need to get things done.
If we all focus on that messaging, I think that the average person in this country will understand that, the government will understand that. The fact that this will cut our deficit is extraordinary given the conversations we’re having right now.
And the fact that we have a president, like him or don’t like him, we have a president who has exhibited a ability to cross the finish line on something that people have felt could not be accomplished in record time.
I think that let’s take the best out of people and let’s join together and try and use the expertise that he has and has shown and frankly proven towards something literally much more important to mankind and to all of our families and to everybody in the world.
PG: So, are you taking this to the White House or are you taking it to Capitol Hill?
LW: No, we’re taking it to the White House.
PG: Taking it to the White House. How soon? What can you tell us? Certainly, don’t tell us anything you don’t want us to know yet.
LW: No, I won’t. I won’t. So, we know a lot of people that are close to the president, obviously. We worked on COVID and got to the president on COVID at the time, and we’ll get to the president.
And the real issue at the end of the day is that the president looks at things in a certain way, as anybody does, as we all get older. We are who we are, we look at things the way we look at things. I believe that the way he looks at things, he views himself as a great problem-solver, he views himself as somebody that can do things that nobody else could have ever done. This is one of those things. And I think we give him the tools to get it done.
And so, I’m excited about the opportunity. But the opportunity is heightened to the extent that we, all of us, can begin talking through the media about the opportunity and explaining to the public why this would greatly enhance our opportunity to prevent people from getting sick and curing people.
And having Otis’s comment as the starting point, from a system that really hasn’t worked to just with what we have today, we can save 20% of the people who die every year in America from cancer from dying.
Without any of this, think of where we could be with this. And I think that’s a great place to start, I think Otis’s comment is a great platform to begin the conversation from.
OB: Thank you. Thank you.
PG: Is there anything we forgot to discuss?
OB: I just want to say thanks to Lou for an innovative idea. Hopefully this gets even more traction, it’s already gotten some. But I’ll end with what I started out saying, we desperately need to find new, innovative ways to finance cancer research.
Cancer research is both basic research as well as clinical research, and the application of the knowledge that we are developing.
PG: Fifty-three years ago, we could have been having a discussion about why the National Cancer Act wouldn’t work and why it was a stupid idea, and yet it turned out not to be. So, it’s important to hear new ideas. And thank you for bringing it up, Lou.
LW: No, my pleasure.
There is incredible momentum building under the surface where people understand that the way we’ve done things in the past, frankly, in the new world, is not the way we should do things in the future.
And we have built a business-like model to change that once and for all, but most importantly accountable with, to Otis’s point, and I’m going to use this, I didn’t even ask Otis for permission, but I’m going to use command and control in every one of my talks about this.
But the opportunity for Paul and Otis and me and a lot of your colleagues to go out with a single voice and talk about this and talk about what this special moment in time and opportunity that we have, I think is compelling.
My point is that I don’t know of any one person I’ve spoken to in the last four weeks who hasn’t come onboard.
And I think that there’s a message there. And especially because I’ve spent 25 years not having that happen, hardly at all, just begging and bowing for somebody to say something positive, to do something positive towards this. I think the timing is right.
PG: That’s good.
LW: Yes.
So, it’s exciting. But I do think it’s important that for Otis, for you to reach out to your colleagues and get them to start talking about this. Especially in the media, or especially writing documents, or just doing a public endorsement. I mean, I think that’s invaluable, the endorsements that we’ve already gotten are extremely invaluable for us as we talk about this.
Because one of the first questions we get is, well, how does the American Cancer Society feel about this? How does Stand Up to Cancer think about this? So everybody who comes on board, and by the way, 24 years ago, we had everybody’s endorsement, we had the American Cancer Society, we had the American Hospital Association. I mean, you go up and down the list, we had everybody. But at that time, it didn’t matter.
Today, it matters, because today we have the momentum. And the last thing I would say is, I dedicate this to the guy who put us on the map. May he rest in peace, to Joe Lieberman.
Because Joe Lieberman stood up when nobody else would stand up. And he had just run for Vice President of the United States, and I had one meeting with him, literally in five minutes he said, “I’m on board. Tell me what you want me to do.”
And he put a bipartisan group together, including some of the most, at the time, famous senators in America. And so, to me, I will be grateful to him forever, because he was a guy that you could sit in a room and talk to, he didn’t have to talk to staff. If he thought it was the right thing for America, he got on board and he got on board now.
PG: Well, you’ve just presented this to 150,000 people in oncology, so let’s see if you’ve got more momentum for this.
LW: But what I would say, Paul is, and again, I don’t know what the article’s going to look like, what I would say is, and you can quote me or Otis or whoever, the way to make this happen is for people to stand up in a unified way behind the concept.
The concept will be tweaked, for sure, but the concept makes sense. From a business perspective, the concept makes sense.
Taking everything that we have talked about, taking all the comments that have been made in the last 30 years by people like Otis, by the head of NCI about the need to bring accountability to the process, they have enough money to bring the pieces together. This, in a very simplistic format, does all of that at one time.
PG: Well, thank you very much.
OB: Thank you.
