All You Wanted To Know About The Cancer Moonshot and More
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Cancer Moonshoot Reignited on 2/2/22
Since the initial launch of the Cancer Moonshot in 2016, the cancer community has made measurable progress toward three ambitious goals: to accelerate scientific discovery in cancer, foster greater collaboration, and improve the sharing of cancer data. Early in 2022, President Biden announced a reignition of the Cancer Moonshot, highlighting new goals: to reduce the cancer death rate by half within 25 years and improve the lives of people with cancer and cancer survivors.
https://www.cancer.gov/research/key-initiatives/moonshot-cancer-initiative
.....progress made to date, including:
Announcing Dr. Renee Wegrzyn as the inaugural Director of ARPA-H, a new agency to drive biomedical innovation that supports the health of all Americans; and
Signing an Executive Order to launch a National Biotechnology and Biomanufacturing Initiative to ensure the United States makes cutting-edge biotechnologies and other innovations;
The Cancer Cabinet’s progress towards delivering game-changing cancer detection technologies and support talented researchers from across the United States.
To the average person, whats not to like. Lets fight Cancer. Go Team! Yay.
Before I go on, a bit of a preamble is required first.
Having been diagnosed with Renal Cancer in 2019 I did a deep dive into cancer and immunology right before COVID. What I learned was rather disappointing. For one thing immunology was a science with far more unknowns than knowns. For another, the clinical trials for cancer therapies were pretty dodgy.
One of the more fascinating books I read was a book called First Cell by Azra Raza, and she makes some points that must be understood to assess the Moonshot.
https://www.amazon.com/First-Cell-Human-Pursuing-Cancer/dp/1541699521
She points out that only 3–5 percent of cancer patients participate in experimental trials; of these, only 3.8 percent of the participants in phase 1 trials between 1991 and 2002 achieved an objective clinical response.
The results for phase 2 and 3 trials are not much better.
FDA is willing to approve an agent if it can prolong survival by a mere 2.5 months over existing treatments. Even with this low bar for approval, only 5 percent of drugs make it to market. Cancer has the lowest success rate among twenty-one disease indications.
Those few drugs that are approved, once they are administered in non-trial settings, the results are no better than those that were not approved. This is partly because of how trials are conducted.
“Subjects participating in experimental protocols are handpicked and generally in reasonable physical shape. They have to pass strict eligibility criteria, including a good performance status, normally functioning heart, lungs, liver, and kidneys, and be free of any serious comorbid condition. Most cancer patients are more decrepit, suffering from additional comorbidities. “
Gee whiz, that sounds familiar (COVID Vaccine Trials)
Over the twelve-year period from 2002 to 2014, seventy-two new anticancer drugs gained FDA approval; they prolonged survival by 2.1 months. Of eighty-six cancer therapies for solid tumors approved between 2006 and 2017, the median gain in overall survival was 2.45 months.
Of the cancer drugs approved during the past two decades, 70 percent of them were at best useless, showing no measurable survival benefit. Between 30 and 70 percent of the drugs may actually be harmful to patients.
Vinay Prasad, a young hematologist-oncologist at Oregon Health & Sciences University, is a major critic of how the United States spends $ 700 billion on health care, identifying drug costs, conflicts of interest, poorly designed clinical trials for cancer drugs and diagnostics, and the fact that “more than half of all practiced medicine is based on scant evidence—and possibly ineffectual” as the major issues in the field.
Prasad published an analysis of fifty-four cancer drugs approved by the FDA between 2008 and 2012. Of those fifty-four drugs, thirty-six, or 67 percent, were approved based on so-called surrogate end points—that is, on the basis of something other than a known effect on the tumor leading to improved survival.
Indeed, follow-up over the next several years showed that thirty-one of those thirty-six approved drugs yielded no demonstrable gains in survival.
More than 90 percent of trials ongoing around the country make almost zero attempt to save tumor samples for post hoc examination to identify predictive biomarkers.
Even in the NCI-funded study of exceptional responders previously mentioned, only genetic mutations were investigated as the single potential predictive marker. What if the reason for response was not a mutated gene but abnormal expression of the gene at the RNA level (epigenetics) or ….related to the microenvironment of the tumor?
At the 2018 meeting of the American Association of Cancer Research, David Hyman from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center presented data on tumors in more than 25,000 patients. Of them, 15 percent matched with an FDA-approved drug and 10 percent with a drug in clinical trials.
Prasad found similar proportions in his latest analysis, where 15 percent of 610,000 US patients with metastatic cancer were eligible for an FDA-approved, genome-guided drug. But once matched, just 6.6 percent likely benefited.
In 2009, Gina Kolata reported in her New York Times column the jaw-dropping statistics that despite the infusion of more than $ 100 billion into cancer research, death rates for cancer had dropped by only 5 percent between 1950 and 2005 when adjusted for size and age of the population. The war on cancer was not going well.
Even though President Nixon and subsequent administrations have continued to invest heavily in cancer research—the dedicated budget for the National Cancer Institute alone rocketing up to more than $ 5 billion, with additional funding, thanks to the “cancer moonshot” backed by President Obama and Vice President Biden—the monies are not being spent as wisely as they could be.
For example, the funding agencies continue to reward basic research in petri dishes and mouse models that bear little relevance for humans, with the majority of investigators using xenografts. A review of where the research funds go reveals the inherent biases perpetuated by the peer-review process as detailed by Clifton Leaf in his eye-opening book, The Truth in Small Doses: Why We’re Losing the War on Cancer and How to Win It.
Enormous sums of money from the government continue to fund the same institutions and universities over and over. How seriously is one to take investigators from such institutions who author more than fifty abstracts for a single cancer meeting?
Just look at the abstracts published by the American Society of Hematology meetings of the past couple of years and you will discover several such researchers, many authoring between fifty and more than one hundred abstracts each.
If you consider the number of international meetings these researchers are rushing around to attend, I am confident you will find a minimum of 250 abstracts per year for each author. It is all a numbers game rather than thoughtful, quality research.
The saddest part is that upon a serious examination of what is published, 70 percent of the basic research is not reproducible and 95 percent of clinical trials are unmitigated disasters.
The art of medicine, once based purely on experience and observation, a hostage to tradition, gradually evolved into a practice increasingly driven by scientific evidence. More recently, it has undergone an unexpected transition by morphing into a monstrous business enterprise.
For oncology, this milestone was reached in the 1990s when the pharmaceutical industry suddenly woke up to the realization that developing cancer treatments offers an untapped market of infinite monetary gains.
The last thirty-five years saw a sweeping, radical change in oncology as drug development responsibilities shifted from academic and government-sponsored institutions to industry. Of course the ultimate aim for both is to bring relief to the cancer patient, but the latter added a profit motive as an attractive by-product.
Under the control of companies whose investments easily reach into billions, far outweighing the paltry sums available before, each new drug was presented for clinical trials as the great, long-awaited panacea.
Sadly, in a tragic anticlimax, the vast majority proved to be useless at the bedside, the remaining few painfully limping to meet the primary end point by improving survival measurable in weeks.
In a nutshell, Cancer is Big Business, very profitable. Who pays for the profits?
A recent study titled, “Death or Debt? National Estimates of Financial Toxicity in Persons with Newly-Diagnosed Cancer,” published in the October 2018 issue of the American Journal of Medicine, tabulates the chilling economic burden borne by patients with newly diagnosed cancer.
Using the Health and Retirement Study Data, this longitudinal study identified 9.5 million estimated new cases of cancer between 1998 and 2012 in the United States.
Two years from diagnosis, 42.4 percent of individuals had depleted their entire life’s assets, and 38.2 percent incurred longer-term insolvency, cancer costs being highest during treatment and in the final months of life.
Figuring out Cancer is tough
Cancer is not linear—it is completely non-linear. It lives in the science of chaos. There’s no single point of control. You need to attack it in a non-linear fashion across time and space, monitoring it and truly dancing with it. If you biopsy a patient with breast cancer twice in the same day, once in the breast and once in the lymph node, you can get cancer cells with different sequences. This heterogeneity breaks all these reductionist assumptions, because which target are you hitting and what made you choose it?
Manipulation of the body’s own immune system to target the cancer is at least a century-old concept. A tremendous amount of knowledge generated regarding the intricate functioning of the immune system is only now starting to become translatable.
Briefly, this is how it works. The job of T cells, key soldiers in the defensive army of the body, is to constantly inspect normal cells for expression of abnormal protein fragments or antigens on their surface. If detected, T cells latch on to the target antigen with talons and release toxic chemicals to destroy the offender.
Cancer cells evolve strategies to deceive T cells by masquerading as normal cells, or expressing too many antigens, which confuse the attacking T cells.
Another tactic cancer cells employ to evade the immune system is to turn off the “Eat me” signal on their surface so that cancer cells are perceived by the immune system as friend rather than foe.
She has far more in her book but thats just a taste.
Now lets look at the challenges and benefits of early detection
Efforts to diagnose cancer early are as old as the declaration of war on cancer. Unfortunately, population-based, conventional screening programs costing astronomical sums of money have not yielded the dramatic success that was expected.
Moreover, the assumption that early detection and therapeutic intervention would lead to cures has also been challenged through cautionary tales associated with these attempts.
For one thing, screening can result in overdiagnosis and overtreatment, and this could harm patients and be an added financial burden on the health care system.
Cancer begins in a single cell, but given the variability in growth rates, it can take decades to become clinically apparent, one study suggesting that the journey for breast cancer could be starting in utero. With the time line spreading over decades for some common tumors, the contention that finding a tumor and eliminating it urgently at some point in its natural history is the only way to cure it is clearly misplaced.
It is therefore no surprise that many cancers detected early—say, through imaging or tumor-specific antigen tests—have proved to be of nonlethal varieties that would have responded to treatment even if detected at a later stage once they became clinically apparent.
Of the aggressive cancers detected early, the news was also less than encouraging: the majority had already disseminated anyway, offering no advantage for early diagnosis.
In breast cancer, for example, early detection of tumors with favorable molecular signatures was not helpful because the tumors would have grown so slowly as to be inconsequential within the life span of the patient, and even if they progressed to a clinically detectable state, they would be amenable to standard available treatments.
Early detection of more aggressive breast cancer was not helpful because by the time the tumor appeared on a mammogram, it had already spread and was incurable.
A review of multiple large population-based studies from several European countries examining the role of mammography as a screening tool led to a depressing conclusion by P. Autier and M. Boniol: “The epidemiological data point to a marginal contribution of mammography screening in the decline in breast cancer mortality. Moreover, the more effective the treatments, the less favourable are the harm-benefit balance of screening mammography.
New, effective methods for breast screening are needed, as well as research on risk-based screening strategies.” The US Preventive Services Task Force recommends biennial screening mammography for women aged fifty through seventy-four, the current evidence being insufficient to assess the benefits and harms of screening mammography in the other age groups.
As far as affecting mortality of prostate cancer, a meta-analysis of multiple studies also failed to show substantial improvement through PSA screening, D. Ilic and colleagues concluding that “at best, screening for prostate cancer leads to a small reduction in disease-specific mortality over 10 years but does not affect overall mortality.
Clinicians and patients considering PSA based screening need to weigh these benefits against the potential short and long term harms of screening, including complications from biopsies and subsequent treatment, as well as the risk of over-diagnosis and overtreatment.”
If there is one situation where early detection markers are urgently needed, it is ovarian cancer; notorious for being a killer of fourteen thousand women annually in the United States, the disease is generally diagnosed when it is already beyond the grasp of curative therapies.
Cancer antigen 125 (CA-125) produced by as many as 80 percent of epithelial ovarian cancers, detectable in the blood with a simple test, was hailed as a welcome advance. Screening studies, however, revealed fundamental problems with the test, calling its use as a screening tool into question.
First, the amount produced by early, small tumors is undetectable in the blood, and by the time blood levels increase, the tumor is already far advanced. Its levels seem related more to the tumor burden since 90 percent of women with stage II ovarian cancer tested positive as opposed to only one-third to one-half with stage I disease.
Second, CA-125 is not always a harbinger of malignancy, present in rare cases of benign, inflammatory situations. This may be why a Swedish study found only 6 cases of ovarian cancer (with 2 out of the 6 at the targeted early treatable stage) from 175 exploratory surgeries following random screening of 5,500 women.
CA-125 measurement is more suited to monitoring the efficacy of a given treatment in established cases of cancer since diminishing levels relate to regressing tumor burden. Clifton Leaf, in his excellent book The Truth in Small Doses, concludes about CA-125: “The point of diagnostic screening is to alter the outlook for many individuals while keeping the cost of unnecessary intervention low.
This biomarker, as with hundreds of other well-touted candidates, managed neither.” Based on minor successes compared to the enormous investment of resources since 1980 in population-based, conventional screening measures, Hans-Olov Adami and colleagues have called for an end to such studies altogether since “population-based early detection screening for cancer has not fulfilled our expectations, and indeed induced considerable harm to a large population of healthy individuals.” They propose saving early detection screening measures for populations at high risk of developing cancer, either because of genetic susceptibility or through lifestyle risks and exposures.
On the other hand, screening has helped save lives of colorectal cancer patients. These cancers start out as benign adenomas and progress in a stepwise manner from stage I through IV so that early detection is helpful. Similarly, screening for cervical cancer, which also progresses through distinct stages from dysplasia to stages I through IV, worked dramatically, as deaths from cervical cancer declined substantially when the Pap test became common practice.
Despite the many pitfalls in screening measures, the 25 percent decrease in overall cancer mortality between 1990 and 2015 is largely due to high-quality screening for breast (down by 39 percent) and colorectal cancers (down by 47 percent in men and 44 percent in women). Of note, most of this screening is preventive screening and not early detection of an established, bona fide cancer.
To summarize, early detection screening tools available thus far are helpful in preventing cancers that evolve in well-defined stages but fail to benefit cancers of unpredictable potency. The latter would include thyroid, prostate, and some breast cancers, where size may not correspond directly to metastatic potential—a small tumor potentially capable of shedding cells early in its development, while larger ones may follow a less aggressive natural course.
The ability to distinguish a cancer patient from a healthy individual is not enough; some tumors grow so slowly that detecting them early and treating them aggressively could be more of a health hazard for the patient than simply letting the cancer grow.
So its a mixed bag. Early detection for some cancers may be helpful, but may be harmful for others. There are hundreds of different cancers. Who decides which to focus on, those with conflicts of interest?
So lets get back to the meat and potato in Bidens Cancer Moonshot
First off, ARPA-H
INAUGURAL ARPA-H DIRECTOR
In March, President Biden created the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) to improve the U.S. government’s ability to speed health and biomedical research. Today, President Biden is announcing his intention to appoint Dr. Renee Wegrzyn as the inaugural director of the new agency.
Dr. Wegrzyn, a leading biomedical scientist with professional experience working for two of the institutions that inspired the creation of ARPA-H – the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) – will deliver the strategy for the agency’s nascent research portfolio and inaugural budget.
America has an extraordinary biomedical system that has delivered stunning advances previously seen as inconceivable – from COVID-19 vaccines to drugs that can eliminate certain cancers. Under Dr. Wegrzyn’s leadership, ARPA-H will support programs and projects that undertake challenges ranging from the molecular to the societal, with the potential to transform entire areas of medicine and health in order to prevent, detect, and treat some of the most complex diseases such as Alzheimer’s, diabetes, and cancer, providing benefits for all Americans.
Here is Whitney Webbs take
ARPA-H is not a new and exclusive Biden administration idea; there was a previous attempt to create a “health DARPA” during the Trump administration in late 2019.
Biden began to promote the idea during his presidential campaign as early as June 2019, albeit using a very different justification for the agency than what had been pitched by its advocates to Trump.
In 2019, the same foundation and individuals currently backing Biden’s ARPA-H had urged then president Trump to create “HARPA,” not for the main purpose of researching treatments for cancer and Alzheimer’s, but to stop mass shootings before they happen through the monitoring of Americans for “neuropsychiatric” warning signs.
The NIH, which would house this new ARPA-H/HARPA, has spent hundreds of millions of dollars experimenting with the use of wearables since 2015, not only for detecting disease symptoms but also for monitoring individuals’ diets and illegal drug consumption. Biden played a key part in that project, known as the Precision Medicine initiative, and separately highlighted the use of wearables in cancer patients as part of the Obama administration’s related Cancer Moonshot program.
The direct DARPA connection to HARPA underscores that the agenda behind this coming agency dates back to the failed Bio-Surveillance project of DARPA’s Total Information Awareness program, which was launched after the events of September 11, 2001.
TIA’s Bio-Surveillance project sought to develop the “necessary information technologies and resulting prototype capable of detecting the covert release of a biological pathogen automatically, and significantly earlier than traditional approaches,” accomplishing this “by monitoring non-traditional data sources” including “pre-diagnostic medical data” and “behavioral indicators.”
While nominally focused on “bioterrorist attacks,” TIA’s Bio-Surveillance project also sought to acquire early detection capabilities for “normal” disease outbreaks. Bio-Surveillance and related DARPA projects at the time, such as LifeLog, sought to harvest data through the mass use of some sort of wearable or handheld technology. These DARPA programs were ultimately shut down due to the controversy over claims they would be used to profile domestic dissidents and eliminate privacy for all Americans in the US.
That DARPA’s past total surveillance dragnet is coming back to life under a supposedly separate health-focused agency, and one that emulates its organizational model no less, confirms that many TIA-related programs were merely distanced from the Department of Defense when officially shut down. By separating the military from the public image of such technologies and programs, it made them more palatable to the masses, despite the military remaining heavily involved behind the scenes.
As Unlimited Hangout has recently reported, major aspects of TIA were merely privatized, giving rise to companies such as Facebook and Palantir, which resulted in such DARPA projects being widely used and accepted. Now, under the guise of the proposed ARPA-H, DARPA’s original TIA would essentially be making a comeback for all intents and purposes as its own spin-off.
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who was intimately involved with Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign and who is close to the Democratic Party in general, chairs the Broad Institute as of this April. In March, Schmidt gave the institute $150 million to “connect biology and machine learning for understanding programs of life.” During his time on the Broad Institute board, Schmidt also chaired the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, a group of mostly Silicon Valley, intelligence, and military operatives who have now charted the direction of the US government’s policies on emerging tech and AI. Schmidt was also pitched as potential head of a tech-industry task force by the Biden administration.
Earlier, in January, the Broad Institute announced that its health-research platform, Terra, which was built with Google subsidiary Verily, would partner with Microsoft. As a result, Terra now allows Google and Microsoft to access a vast trove of genomic data that is poured into the platform by academics and research institutions from around the world.
In addition, last September, Google teamed up with the Department of Defense as part of a new AI-driven “predictive health” program that also has links to the US intelligence community. While initially focused on predicting cancer cases, this initiative clearly plans to expand to predicting the onset of other diseases before symptoms appear, including COVID-19.
As noted by Unlimited Hangout at the time, one of the ulterior motives for the program, from Google’s perspective, was for Google to gain access to “the largest repository of disease- and cancer-related medical data in the world,” which is held by the Defense Health Agency. Having exclusive access to this data is a huge boon for Google in its effort to develop and expand its growing suite of AI health-care products.
https://www.technocracy.news/spawn-of-darpa-arpa-h-is-fast-track-to-digital-dictatorship/
We know what the Defense Health Agency does with data they don’t like (like with COVID Vaccinations they hide it-)
Now for the NBBI
NATIONAL BIOTECHNOLOGY & BIOMANUFACTURING INITIATIVE (NBBI)
Today, President Biden will sign an executive order that establishes the Biotechnology and Biomanufacturing Initiative to ensure cutting-edge biotechnologies necessary to end cancer as we know it and other innovations will be developed and manufactured in America. This will save lives, create jobs at home, build stronger supply chains, and lower prices for American families even in times of global turbulence.
Other countries are positioning themselves to become the world’s resource for biotechnology solutions and bio-manufactured products — this new initiative adds to President Biden’s economic plan to bring back manufacturing jobs to the United States. The United States has for too long relied heavily on foreign materials for bioproduction, and our past off-shoring of critical industries, including biotechnology, presents a threat to our ability to access key materials like including the active pharmaceutical ingredients for life-saving medications.
This initiative will grow the strength and diversity of domestic biomanufacturing capacity, expand market opportunities for bio-based products through the federal programs, drive research and development across all relevant agencies, streamline and harmonize appropriate regulation, and prioritize investments in applied biosafety research in biosecurity to reduce risk throughout research and development lifecycles. This initiative is rooted in the principles of equity, ethics, safety, and security that will help benefit all Americans and the global community, and maintain United States technological leadership and economic competitiveness.
Well, that doesn’t tell you much, but from this substack we see
The Executive Order adopted many proposals from the Schmidt Futures’ Task Force on Synthetic Biology and the Bioeconomy. But it was, otherwise, generally sparse on details. How much money will the U.S. government invest? What will the training programs look like? Many of these questions were answered this morning, as the White House announced plans to allocate $2 billion in funding before its Summit on Biotechnology and Biomanufacturing. Here are the highlights.
The global bioeconomy will be worth between $4 and $30 trillion by the end of the decade. The entirety of U.S. GDP today is about $21 trillion.
The CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 was signed into law on August 9. It appropriated $52.7 billion over five years for the semiconductor manufacturing industry, and $170 billion for research and development initiatives. We now know that about $2 billion will go towards academic science, industry R&D, training programs, the development of ethical frameworks for biotechnology, and a slew of other strategic investments.
The White House this morning announced more than $2 billion in funding for the National Biotechnology and Biomanufacturing Initiative. This funding includes:
$40 million for the Department of Health and Human Services to expand biomanufacturing, mainly for pharmaceuticals.
$270 million for the Department of Defense (DoD) to launch a “Tri-Service Biotechnology for a Resilient Supply Chain program.”
Over the next five years, the DoD “will be investing nearly $1.5 billion to expand U.S. bioindustrial manufacturing infrastructure.” To prove that ‘government-funded innovation’ is not oxymoronic, Hicks appealed to DARPA’s work in funding early mRNA vaccine work ten years ago.
The DoD will allocate an additional $200 million to strengthen biosecurity and cybersecurity technologies for biomanufacturing facilities.
This morning’s summit also featured comments from Jason Kelly (CEO of Ginkgo Bioworks), Jennifer Holmgren (CEO of Lanzatech) and Gaurab Chakrabarti (CEO of Solugen). Each talked about their companies and how they are already building the bioeconomy. Jason emphasized the need to more reliably program living cells, much like “installing an app on your phone,” while Jennifer emphasized that LanzaTech is already capturing waste carbon from industrial factories, and can convert that waste into roughly 100 different chemicals, including polyester for dresses.
[Note: the new ARPA-H Director is a former VP of Ginko]
Well what could be wrong with all of that besides the obvious. War on Cancer 2.0. We all know how these War on “Whatever’s” work out. More of the “Whatever” and a lot of Rich folks getting richer fighting it (or creating more of it to get more money) while you get poorer and lose more freedoms
Lets see what else they say
CANCER CABINET’S PROGRESS TOWARDS ENDING CANCER AS WE KNOW IT
When the President and First Lady reignited the Cancer Moonshot seven months ago, the first-ever Cancer Cabinet was formed to mobilize all levers of the federal government and realize the President’s vision of ending cancer as we know it. In July 2022, the Cancer Cabinet unveiled priority actions to: (1) close the screening gap, (2) understand and address environmental exposure, (3) decrease the impact of preventable cancers, (4) bring cutting edge research through the pipeline to patients and communities, and (5) support patients and caregivers.
The Cancer Cabinet is announcing the following progress made towards reaching these goals:
Inflation Reduction Act Lowers Costs of Prescription Drugs for Cancer Patients: Because President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act caps out-of-pocket prescription drug costs at $2,000 per year for Medicare beneficiaries, tens of thousands of cancer patients could see their prescription drug costs go down by thousands annually. For example, in 2019, Zytiga, a drug used to treat prostate cancer, had an expected out-of-pocket cost of $8,181 per year, researchers found. Thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act, seniors and other beneficiaries who use that drug could save over $6,000 each year. Moreover, the number of beneficiaries who benefit from the cap is likely to increase, since 30% of Medicare unsubsidized beneficiaries fail to fill prescriptions for cancer drugs when faced with such high costs, a recent study found.
National Cancer Institute (NCI) Launches Vanguard Study on Multi-Cancer Detection: As a central component of the Cancer Moonshot, the National Cancer Institute launched a large national trial that, if successful will identify effective blood tests for the detection of one or more cancers, providing the opportunity for additional, less-invasive tools for early detection. A new four-year pilot study will enroll 24,000 people ages 45 to 70 years to lay the groundwork for a large randomized controlled trial that will enroll 225,000 people. The studies will be funded in part by 21st Century Cures Act Cancer Moonshot funds and will begin enrolling in 2024. Grant opportunities studies have recently been opened with more to be released before the end of 2022.
Cancer Moonshot Scholars Program Now Accepts Applications from the Next Generation of Cancer Innovators: The National Cancer Institute has opened a brand-new early-career grant opportunity to invest in the next generation of innovative cancer researchers with a focus on developing a cancer research workforce that is more representative of the U.S. population. The goal of the Cancer Moonshot Scholars program is to inspire and support the next generation of world-class and diverse researchers focused on scientific breakthroughs that will make a difference for patients and drive progress toward the goal of ending cancer as we know it today. NCI expects to support cohorts of dozens of Cancer Moonshot Scholars in initial rounds, beginning in 2023 with project periods of up to five years.
White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) Issues Guidance to Make Federally-Funded Research Available: Recently, the Biden-Harris Administration updated U.S. policy guidance to make the results of taxpayer-supported research immediately available to the American public at no cost. In a memorandum to federal departments and agencies, Dr. Alondra Nelson, the head of OSTP, delivered guidance for agencies to update their public access policies as soon as possible and no later than December 31, 2025 to make publications and research funded by taxpayers publicly accessible, without an embargo or cost. This updated guidance will affect the more than 200,000 federally-funded studies each year, delivering to all areas of scientific discovery what was already required of Cancer Moonshot grants from the National Cancer Institute as part of then-Vice President Biden’s vision for how to bring the benefits of federally-funded research to all Americans.
Department of Defense Creates Research Program to Understand Military Toxic Exposure: The Department of Defense’s Murtha Cancer Center Research Program has launched a new program with the goal of understanding the impact of service-related toxic exposure on the development of cancer in members of the military. PROMETHEUS, or the PROject for Military Exposures and Toxin History Evaluation in U.S. service members will bring together agency and private sector innovators to understand and address cancer in exposed service members. It brings together significant DoD capabilities including the DoD Serum Repository which contains blood samples for all service members; the Individual Longitudinal Exposure Record (ILER) which tracks toxin exposures; the DOD Tumor Registry which tracks cancer diagnoses in active duty; DoD Framingham which analyzes blood proteins in active duty with cancer; the Joint Pathology Center which is the DoD’s pathology center of excellence; and APOLLO, which was created in response to the Cancer Moonshot in 2016 now with a network of 13 hospitals to carry out military-specific research.
NCI Establishes Telehealth Centers of Excellence to Improve Cancer Care: Last month, NCI announced $23 million to support the creation of a Telehealth Research Centers of Excellence (TRACE), which will study the role of telehealth in cancer prevention, screening, diagnosis, treatment, survivorship, and equity of access and outcomes. Four funded research centers will conduct large trials in real-world clinical settings, including hospitals, nd primary care offices, to determine whether the use of telehealth —used broadly during the COVID-19 pandemic – can effectively deliver quality cancer care. This ground-breaking program will identify best practices for cancer telehealth to drive implementation of sustainable telehealth practices to offer many benefits to patients.
National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Expands Partnerships to Deliver New Cancer Technologies: NIST and the Department of Commerce-sponsored Manufacturing USA institute, The National Institute for Innovation in Manufacturing Biopharmaceuticals, recently awarded funding to two project teams to ensure that cellular therapies for cancer can be more efficiently and consistently manufactured. Together, the projects will produce innovative and scalable manufacturing processes and create new partnerships for workforce training in cell and gene-therapy manufacturing. NIST and the Medical Device Innovation Consortium signed a cooperative research and development agreement to develop and manufacture DNA reference samples engineered to contain mutations commonly tested for diagnosing and targeting drugs for cancer. These investments hold the promise to speed progress in the development of advancing cancer precision medicine by simplifying the process for validating diagnostics and enabling technology, bioinformatics, and artificial intelligence developers to optimize and demonstrate accuracy of their methods.
Facilitate Data Sharing Advances the Bioeconomy: As part of the new Biotechnology and Biomanufacturing Initiative, the National Institutes of Health is expanding the Cancer Research Data Ecosystem, a national data infrastructure that encourages data sharing to support cancer care for individual patients and enables discovery of new treatments. USDA is working with NIH to ensure that data on persistent poverty can be integrated with cancer surveillance. The National Science Foundation recently announced a competition for a new $20 million biosciences data center to increase our understanding of living systems at small scales, which will produce new biotechnology designs to make products in agriculture, medicine and health, and materials.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2022/09/12/fact-sheet-president-biden-details-cancer-moonshot-progress-and-new-initiatives-on-60th-anniversary-of-president-kennedys-moonshot-address/
To summarize
Lower out of pocket drug costs. Sounds wonderful. But does not address the reason these drugs prices are so high. The answer is monopoly pricing despite the use of government funded research to develop these drugs. Also, who pays? The tax payer (Medicare). Furthermore, not everyone with cancer is on Medicare
Effective blood tests for the detection of one or more cancers. This is dangerous unless the tests have undergone validation to eliminate false positives. Otherwise, it becomes a way for the Medical-Pharma Mafia to find new customers that get their expensive treatments and adverse events without much benefit. Also, many cancers take years to grow enough to cause symptoms, in an 80 year old for example they will not know they ever had cancer before they died. In younger people with healthy immune systems its likely many of these very small cancers are crushed by their own immune systems unencumbered by the stress of “OMG, I have cancer”. There are hundreds of different cancers and while some may benefit by early detection others are best left until the reach a certain size before undergoing treatment (eg prostate cancer) which has significant adverse effects.
Support the next generation of world-class and diverse researchers focused on scientific breakthroughs. Sounds so nice but what they really mean is to control the next generation of scientists so they only research what is permitted, avoiding finding the cause that harms a profitable industry and develop profitable treatments needing long term courses of expensive drugs (cancer as a chronic disease) and not short term non-expensive treatments that cure the patient
To make the results of taxpayer-supported research immediately available to the American public at no cost. I must say I cant see much wrong with that. Of course, its mostly already the case today and the fact is most of these research papers are simply government funded propaganda that serve to market Pharmas products based on fraudulent clinical trials. The research they don’t want you to see never gets published
Understanding the impact of service-related toxic exposure on the development of cancer in members of the military. PROMETHEUS, or the PROject for Military Exposures and Toxin History Evaluation in U.S. service members will bring together agency and private sector innovators to understand and address cancer in exposed service members. Sounds nice but maybe if the purpose in understanding is to squash research that might detect the association, or introduce those toxins to targeted undesirable populations.
To determine whether the use of telehealth —used broadly during the COVID-19 pandemic – can effectively deliver quality cancer care. Its a good way to keep the Doctors from developing a relationship with their patient, and comes at the risk of missing tell tale clinical symptoms a physical exam might detect and which the patient might be unaware of. There are also privacy issues
Speed progress in the development of advancing cancer precision medicine by simplifying the process for validating diagnostics and enabling technology, bioinformatics, and artificial intelligence developers to optimize and demonstrate accuracy of their methods. Oh lord, bringing Operation Warp Speed to Cancer dx and Treatment and let programmed AI decide if they are accurate or effective. Like with Models, given enough free parameters you can model an Elephant that can fly.
Expanding the Cancer Research Data Ecosystem, a national data infrastructure that encourages data sharing to support cancer care for individual patients and enables discovery of new treatments. Data is the new Oil. Can be used for Good or Bad
A new $20 million biosciences data center to increase our understanding of living systems at small scales, which will produce new biotechnology designs to make products in agriculture, medicine and health, and materials. New Biotechnology Designs. Like Human 2.0 and Human 1/4, and various Human -Animal , Human-Machine, and Human-Insect hybrids? Ok, maybe I am stretching things😂
If you want to cut down on cancers and cancer deaths find out whats causing them. Many cancer researchers have fallen into the trap of believing most are related to genetics. However, epigenetic changes (a change in the expression of your genes) as a result of environmental stresses altering our immune responses are likely to be a more important factor. Contrary to popular opinion our understanding of immunology and its role in cancer is in its infancy
The moonshot has the laudable objective of reducing the number of cancer deaths by 50 percent in the next 25 years
[Me: if you reduce population by 50% you cut cancer deaths by 50%]
The cause or causes of cancer are unknown. Medical personnel always ask if you are or have been a smoker, but there are no definitive studies to indicate that smoking is a cause [of many cancers].
There are many everyday products that have been placed on the market for human use with little or no research into their potential for causing cancer — Roundup, personal care products containing benzene, asbestos and so many more. The cancer-causing effects of many products are only discovered from the outcome of class-action lawsuits brought to recover damages for countless unnecessary deaths.
[lets not forget GMO foods, glyphosate, RF/EMR, insane amount of vaccines and drugs given to children, etc]
Manufacturers should be required to ensure new products have no carcinogenic effects before placing them on the market. And funding for the National Toxicology Program, which studies and identifies carcinogens, must be substantially increased.
Long-term funding and preventive action are essential if the promise of the moonshot is to be achieved. President Biden is to be commended for this worthwhile initiative, but, as with golf and many other worthy endeavors, success depends on the follow through.
https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/3649467-the-success-of-bidens-cancer-moonshot-depends-on-the-follow-through/
And lets look at Bidens Cancer Initiative he set up after launching the initial Cancer Moon Shot with Obama in 2016
However, Biden’s own “moonshot” isn’t safe from scrutiny. That’s because back in 2017, the then former Vice President and his wife started The Biden Cancer Initiative, their own cancer research charity, to “develop and drive implementation of solutions to accelerate progress in cancer prevention, detection, diagnosis, research and care and to reduce disparities in cancer outcomes.”
The only problem was how the money the organization was spent. Being a non-profit organization, The Biden Cancer Initiative’s books are required to be made available to the public. As such, those who took the time to see the books saw something disturbing: the organization spent nothing on actual cancer research.
You read that right. The Biden Cancer Initiative spent exactly zero dollars on fighting cancer.
So, where did the money go?
The New York Post reported in 2020 that of the nearly $5 million raised, over $3 million was spent on payroll. The Biden Cancer Initiative’s president Gregory Simon personally pocketed nearly $225,000 in his first year on the job and got a raise to nearly $430,000 in year two.
Simon, who led the Obama regime’s “Cancer Moonshot Taskforce” back in the day, had been an executive for Pfizer.
At the same time, Danielle Carnival, who was the chief of staff for the same “Cancer Moonshot Taskforce” was also an executive for The Biden Cancer Initiative. She raked in over $258,000 in 2018 alone.
Biden’s organization also spent massive amounts of money on conferences and travel. After spending over $56,000 on conferences in year one, the figure swelled to over $742,000 in year two. Similarly, travel expenses jumped from over $59,000 to over $97,000 in year two.
Ultimately, The Biden Cancer Initiative closed its doors ahead of Biden’s presidential run in 2019, just in time for Joe to announce his candidacy. In the end, the only thing that the organization [seemed to do] was line the pockets of former Obama regime members
I hope I am wrong and the Cancer Moonshot succeeds without placing us all into a Digital Biological Gulag under constant biological surveillance with implants and wearables and free choice to pursue or not pursue affordable and effective treatments. Unfortunately I cant imagine they actually care about people and want us to live fruitful, free and longer lives.
And before they transition us from meat to a genetically modified insect diet or develop more mRNA vaccines, do you think they will test them long enough to make sure they don’t cause Cancer? I think we know the answer to that. Nuff said.