In a powerful State of the Union address, his final as president of the United States, Barrack Obama has announced a new American initiative to cure cancer.
Referring to vice-president Joe Biden's comments last year, when Biden announced he would not be running for president in 2016, in part due to the death of his son, Beau, from cancer, Obama
introduced what could amount to be one of his most important scientific
policies.
Biden has pledged
to increase resources to fight cancer, both public and private, and to
break down these silos "and bring all the cancer fighters together, to
work together, share information, and end cancer as we know it," with
the ultimate goal of doubling the current rate of progress in cancer
research, making a decade worth of advances in the next five years. Biden will be bringing together researchers, physicians, government
bodies and corporations, to encourage greater collaboration between what
he says are disparate groups. One such collective, announced alongside
Obama and Biden's initiative, is a group calling itself Moonshot 2020,
consisting of a coalition of pharmaceutical companies who aim to
complete clinical trials for up to 20 tumor types in as many as 20,000
patients by the year 2020.
No comments:
Post a Comment