HealthDay reporter
TUESDAY, Sept. 13, 2022 (HealthDay News) — President Joe Biden made a new push for his cancer initiative on Monday.
Speaking at the famed John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston, Biden likened JFK’s race in space to his own effort to reduce cancer rates by 50% in the next 25 years.
“He established a national purpose that could rally the American people and a common cause,” Biden said of Kennedy’s space effort.
“And I think we can preach the same unwillingness to postpone, the same national purpose, that would serve to organize and measure our best energies and skills to eradicate cancer as we know it and even cure cancers once and for all,” he added.
In his speech, Biden said the US National Cancer Institute (NCI) has launched a study that will look at the use of blood tests to detect many cancers.
Danielle Carnival, the White House’s coordinator for cancer control, told News agency The Biden administration sees huge potential in these blood tests.
“One of the most promising technologies is to develop blood tests that promise to detect many cancers in a single blood test and to imagine the impact that could have on our ability to detect cancer early and in a more equitable way,” Carnival said.
Carnival said National Cancer Institute The study is designed so that any promising results can be quickly put into clinical practice while the longer study – expected to last up to a decade – continues. The goal, she said, is to detect cancers through routine blood work rather than invasive tests biopsies.
This issue is personal to Biden, who lost his son Beau in 2015 brain cancer. After Poe’s death, Congress passed the 21st Century Cure Act, which appropriated $1.8 billion over seven years for cancer research and was signed into law by President Barack Obama in 2016.
Despite this, the Cancer Initiative lacks the same level of funding that the space program had. More than $20 billion, equivalent to more than $220 billion in 2022, was pumped into the Apollo space program, AP mentioned.
While promoting the Cancer Initiative Monday, Biden announced that Dr. Renee Figerzen will become the inaugural director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), which is tasked with studying therapies and potential treatments for cancer, Alzheimer’s and diabetes. and other diseases. Biden also announced a new NCI program that will fund young scientists studying treatments and Cancer treatmentsfocusing on underrepresented groups.
Even without new breakthroughs, progress could be made by making cancer care more equitable, said Dr. Crystal Denlinger, chief scientific officer of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network. AP.
But any effort to reduce cancer mortality will need to focus on the biggest killer of cancer, lung cancer AP mentioned. Mostly attributed to smoking, lung cancer now causes more cancer deaths than any other cancer.
Lung cancer screening helps. The American Cancer Society says such screening has helped cut the cancer death rate by 32% from its peak between 1991 and 2019 AP mentioned.
more information
Visit the US National Cancer Institute to learn more about the Cancer Moon Program.
Source: White House press release, September 12, 2022; News agency
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