CANCER - 'Moon-Shot' to Cure Cancer?

JFK:  "We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win."

Now.... are we ready to cure cancer?

"Can America come together to cure cancer?" PBS NewsHour 1/14/2016

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  In his last State of the Union address, President Obama tapped Vice President Joe Biden to lead an effort to boost and streamline national cancer research.  What would such an initiative look like?  Judy Woodruff gets insight from Dr. Francis Collins of the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Otis Brawley of the American Cancer Society and Katie Couric of Stand Up To Cancer.

JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour):  For a look at what an initiative might look like, and who would be involved, and how it might go forward, we turn to three people with long ties to cancer research.

Dr. Otis Brawley is chief medical officer at the American Cancer Society.  Dr. Francis Collins is the director of the National Institutes of Health.  And Katie Couric, in addition to being the well-known journalist and author, she is also one of the co-founders of Stand Up to Cancer.  It’s a charitable group that supports collaborative research.

And we welcome all three of you to the program.

Dr. Brawley, let me start with you.

Is it realistic for the president to say, let’s cure cancer once and for all?

DR. OTIS BRAWLEY, American Cancer Society:  Well, I think the cure analogy is fine.

What’s really going to happen is some cancers, if we intensify our efforts, will be cured.  Many cancers are going to be stalled out to where they become very chronic diseases, like diabetes.  But the end result is, people are going to be better for it.

JUDY WOODRUFF:  Francis Collins, Dr. Collins, do you agree?  I mean, we know there are, what, over 100 — maybe hundreds of types of cancer?  What are people to think about this?

DR. FRANCIS COLLINS, National Institutes of Health:  Well, I hope they will be inspired and excited about this.

Yes, there are hundreds of types of cancer, but we are at an inflection point in terms of things we are learning about what causes this disease, where good cells go bad, and what could we do about it?  And by bring together immunotherapy, the new way of activating the immune system to tackle cancel, genomics, and making sure that everybody is sharing the data they’re developing in those kinds of studies, the Vice President, a man of great passion and principle, is determined that this is not going to be a tweak on the system.

This is going to be a major acceleration of the effort to discover how to treat and cure, in many instances, cancer.  And goodness knows, we can all get excited about that outcome.