{"id":20357,"date":"2016-01-18T09:00:30","date_gmt":"2016-01-18T17:00:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spijue.wpengine.com\/news\/biden-sees-politics-of-cancer-world-as-obstacle-to-a-cure\/"},"modified":"2016-01-18T09:00:30","modified_gmt":"2016-01-18T17:00:30","slug":"biden-sees-politics-of-cancer-world-as-obstacle-to-a-cure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/news\/biden-sees-politics-of-cancer-world-as-obstacle-to-a-cure\/","title":{"rendered":"Biden sees politics of cancer world as obstacle to a cure"},"content":{"rendered":"

WASHINGTON<\/strong> \u2014 Four weeks after announcing he wouldn\u2019t run for president, Joe Biden returned to the world-renowned cancer center in Texas where doctors had tried to save his son\u2019s life.<\/p>\n

Officially, the vice president was in Houston to speak about infrastructure spending and raise money for Democrats. Left off of his public schedule was a meeting with Dr. Ronald DePinho, president of MD Anderson Cancer Center, whose Moon Shots Program has set out to end the dreaded disease.<\/p>\n

Since declaring his own \u201cmoonshot\u201d to cure cancer three months ago, Biden researched what\u2019s holding back a cure, searching for answers with all the meticulousness of a physician diagnosing disease. His conclusion: The hold-up, in large part, lies in the cancer world itself.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy grandpop used to say, \u2018Joey, there\u2019s three kinds of politics\u2019\u201d \u2014 church politics, labor politics and regular politics, Biden recalled recently, before adding one of his own. \u201cWell, there\u2019s four kinds. There\u2019s cancer politics.\u201d<\/p>\n

He deemed that particular brand even more vexing than the rest.<\/p>\n

As one of his final acts in office, Biden has resolved to \u201cbreak down silos\u201d he says are pervasive throughout the sprawling and fragmented world of oncologists, scientists and benefactors. Meetings with nearly 200 of them revealed a community rife with competition, territorialism and resistance to information-sharing that\u2019s left researchers and their discoveries cloistered in their own corners, aides and others who met with Biden said.<\/p>\n

Asked how Americans could help, Biden minced no words: \u201cDemand collaboration from the scientific community,\u201d he wrote on Twitter.<\/p>\n

Biden, who will kick off his initiative Friday with a tour and discussion at Philadelphia\u2019s Abramson Cancer Center, has yet to lay out exactly what he\u2019ll do over the next 12 months that hasn\u2019t been done in the half century since Richard Nixon declared war on cancer.<\/p>\n

But advisers said in addition to pushing for more funding, Biden would use his influence to encourage data-sharing about patients and treatment outcomes, so researchers from various institutions can better build on each other\u2019s work. A key focus will be promising advances in immunotherapy, which uses the immune system to attack tumors, and \u201cprecision medicine,\u201d which personalizes treatments based on the genetic makeup of a patient\u2019s tumors.<\/p>\n

For Biden, the emotional undertones of his mission are difficult to avoid. After his 46-year-old son, Beau Biden, died from brain cancer in May, Biden entered a period of painfully public mourning, followed eventually by his decision against getting into the presidential race.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is still a blow that he\u2019s still recovering from,\u201d said former Sen. Ted Kaufman, a Biden confidante for many decades. \u201cHe\u2019s in his problem-solving mode. He\u2019s more comfortable in this area because of his desire to eliminate this thing that caused him so much damage.\u201d<\/p>\n

Biden is not a doctor, nor a medical researcher. So when he announced a bid \u201cto cure cancer,\u201d more than a few eyebrows were raised. Some wondered whether Biden was raising expectations in a way he could later regret.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m an eternal optimist, but I\u2019m not going to go around saying we\u2019re going to cure cancer in five years. That\u2019s just not realistic,\u201d said Dr. George Demetri, a Harvard Medical School professor and researcher at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute who met with Biden\u2019s staff. \u201cThere\u2019s a fine line between having big, hairy, audacious goals and realistic goals, so the public doesn\u2019t come back and say in five years, \u2018Hey, you didn\u2019t deliver on that, pal.\u2019 \u201c<\/p>\n

Even President Barack Obama, quizzed by a fourth-grader, said Thursday that cancer \u201cprobably won\u2019t be cured in my lifetime, but I think it\u2019ll be cured in yours.\u201d<\/p>\n

Immense progress has been made in recent years. Survival rates for most cancers are increasing, although the American Cancer Society still predicts nearly 1.7 million new cancer cases this year and nearly 600,000 deaths.<\/p>\n

In a blog post this week coinciding with Obama\u2019s State of the Union address, Biden offered a more measured but still ambitious goal for himself: to double the rate of progress so that researchers make 10 years of progress in what would normally take five. \u201cThis is our moonshot,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Because cancer takes hundreds of forms, it can\u2019t be eradicated by any single advance. Cancer researchers who met with Biden recently said he was intrigued by the possibilities for improving prevention and early detection.<\/p>\n

Skewing typical partisan divides, the issue also offers rare prospects for Democrats and Republicans to make common cause in Obama and Biden\u2019s last year. Sen. Roy Blunt, a Missouri Republican, worked directly with Biden last month to secure a long-awaited funding boost for the National Institutes of Health, including $260 million for cancer.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat does \u2018cure cancer\u2019 mean? Does it mean prevent cancer? Does it mean nobody dies from cancer? I don\u2019t know about that,\u201d Blunt said in an interview. \u201cBut I do know that we can enhance dramatically the way we look at cancer, understand cancer and deal with it.\u201d<\/p>\n

___<\/p>\n

AP Medical Writer Lauran Neergaard contributed to this report.<\/p>\n

___<\/p>\n

Reach Josh Lederman on Twitter at http:\/\/twitter.com\/joshledermanAP. His work can be found at http:\/\/bigstory.ap.org\/author\/josh-lederman<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

WASHINGTON \u2014 Four weeks after announcing he wouldn\u2019t run for president, Joe Biden returned to the world-renowned cancer center in Texas where doctors had tried to save his son\u2019s life. Officially, the vice president was in Houston to speak about infrastructure spending and raise money for Democrats. Left off of his public schedule was a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":20358,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":4,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[65],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-20357","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-nation-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20357","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20357"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20357\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20358"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20357"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20357"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20357"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=20357"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}