Biden seeks to tackle politics of cancer

• Biden appeared at Penn Medicine's Abramson Cancer Center in Philadelphia
• President Barack Obama during his State of the Union address discussed the Biden cancer initiative

PHILADELPHIA Vice President Joe Biden launched his "moonshot" initiative Friday to find a cure for cancer, calling on more funding from individuals and governments, and an increase in sharing of health research data by scientists. The effort comes eight months after the death of his son, former Delaware Attorney General Beau Biden, of brain cancer.

"You're on the cusp of some phenomenal breakthroughs. In my terms – not your medical terms – we are at an inflection point in the fight against cancer," the vice president told cancer scientists and researchers at Penn Medicine's Abramson Cancer Center in Philadelphia for the announcement.

His choice of the venue was not only to call attention to the institute's pioneering efforts on immunotherapy, but also because Penn is the alma mater of many in his family, including son Beau Biden, who died on May 30 at 46.

"My son went here, my daughter went here, my granddaughter is a senior here," Joe Biden said during the meeting.

President Barack Obama, during the State of the Union address on Tuesday, said the vice president would lead a nationwide effort to address a cancer cure.

"I’m putting Joe in charge of mission control," Obama said. "Let’s make America the country that cures cancer once and for all."

The vice president on Friday said Obama will soon announce an executive order directing multiple agencies to act in a new federal task force to fight cancer. There will be a wide range of agencies involved in the effort including the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and the Department of Defense. Those agencies need to lead a new push in sharing health data so that researchers can more easily see growing trends in the population, Joe Biden said.

Additional funding from both the public and private sectors is also integral, he said.

"We can have the federal government and the American people make contributions to the fight," he said, "as well as coordinate and collaborate all the agencies in the federal government."

The vice president raised the idea of finding a cure for cancer during his October speech in the Rose Garden where he said he would not run for president in 2016. The announcement came after weeks of speculation that he would seek the nomination.

However, the vice president said he decided against starting a campaign because the emotional scars of losing his son were too fresh. Instead, he said that a cancer cure would become a mission.

"And I believe we need a moonshot in this country to cure cancer," he said during the Rose Garden speech. "It's personal. But I know we can do this. The president and I have already been working hard on increasing funding for research and development – because there are so many breakthroughs just on the horizon in science and medicine."

Since then, the vice president has searched for answers about what's holding back a cure, meeting with nearly 200 scientists. Aides have said he has found a community rife with competition, territorialism and "stove-piping" of information that's left researchers and their discoveries cloistered in their own corners.

Cancer researchers work in too many silos, he said Friday. The challenge is to convince companies that are researching cancer treatments to share their discoveries – an activity that could be contrary to their economic self-interest, he said.

"In order to reach the goal we're all talking about, by definition, it has to be all inclusive," he said.

In addition to the long-term goal of a cure, the vice president wants to see cancer treatment periods cut in half.

A key focus will be promising advances such as immunotherapy. At the cancer center Friday, researchers are exploring what's known as chimeric antigen receptor technology, in which a patient's immune cells are engineered outside of their body to hunt for tumors, then infused back into the patient's body. The White House said 250 patients have been treated with the approach, with early promising results.

Another priority for the vice president is to further "precision medicine," which personalizes treatments based on the genetic makeup of a patient's tumors. Cancer researchers who met with Biden recently said he was intrigued by the possibilities for improving prevention and early detection.

The National Cancer Institute estimated that nearly 600,000 people in the U.S. died from cancer in 2015.  In Delaware, the cancer death rate has historically been higher than the national average, but it is decreasing, according to a 2015 report from the state Public Health Division. The rate of people dying of cancer in the state dropped nearly 16 percent during study periods extending from 1997 and 2011.

Delaware's place in the State of the Union

The vice president successfully lobbied members of Congress last month to boost cancer research funding at the National Institutes of Health through the federal omnibus spending bill.  The institutes will receive a total of $32.1 billion in 2016, an increase of $2 billion over the previous year, which includes an additional $264 million for cancer.

“Last month, (Biden) worked with Congress to give scientists at the National Institutes of Health the strongest resources that they’ve had in over a decade,” Obama said during the State of the Union address.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest said during a Tuesday press briefing that there is bipartisan support for investments in medical innovation. Republican interest in the economic and scientific benefits of investments in medical breakthroughs is “clearly consistent with the kind of a ‘moon shot’ that the vice president has talked about,” Earnest said.

"We really are committed as a government, as Congress," Joe Biden said.  "The only thing that got a spontaneous standing ovation (during the State of the Union) was the announcement of us taking a very hard approach" to cancer research.

The flow of cancer research funding has slowed from both public and private sources during the past decade for smaller research institutions, said Dr. Kenneth van Golen, a cancer scientist at the University of Delaware’s Department of Biological Science.

“There has been quite a bit of money put into this (since the 1970s) but it has not been sustained,” van Golen said.

Van Golen, who studies inflammatory breast cancer, said he hopes the vice president's effort will increase the overall funding pie, while also emphasizing the need for more early-stage research – the kind of studies that may not yield therapies for many years.

Many of his and his students' projects have relied upon small donations from individuals to proceed, he said.

One in particular has shown promise in mice, Van Golen said. He and his UD research team has determined that there is a protein that can be shut down in a cancer cell in a mouse and it will stop the cancer from growing.  Impeding the protein will also make the cancer more susceptible to chemotherapy treatments, he said. If the results also occur in human patients, less of those chemical-based anti-cancer drugs would need to be used, he said.

“When you inhibit the protein, the cells just stop growing” in mice, he said.

The problem, van Golen said, is that he can’t find a large investor to finance the research.

“I’ve approached a couple different (investors) and they just hemmed and hawed,” he said. “We keep it going with donations of a few thousand dollars at a time.”

Innovative new treatments are only part of the solution to fight cancer, said Dr. Karyl Rattay, director of the Delaware Division of Public Health.  She said she would like Biden’s effort to also emphasize prevention, particularly through decreasing smoking and obesity rates.  Roughly 20 percent of Delaware adults use tobacco, she said.

“We feel there’s great value in prevention,” Rattay said.

Rattay said it is mostly lifestyle factors that contribute to Delaware’s higher than average cancer rates.  A connection between the state’s history as a chemical producer and cancer incidents has not been found, she said.  She noted, however, that cancer is the number one cause of death in Delaware.

Despite that ominous statistic, the vice president said he is optimistic about the prospect of Americans curing cancer. It is not an naive initiative, he said, but researchers will need access to big data. The vice president plans hold a series of meetings with cabinet secretaries to talk about increasing federal funds. He also plans to discuss the effort with global cancer experts at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, next week, officials said.

To lead the new federal task force, Joe Biden said, he will need constant input from the nation's cancer doctors.

"I need guidance, I need your advice," he said.

Contact Karl Baker at kbaker@delawareonline.com or (302) 324-2329. Follow him on Twitter @kbaker6.