President Joe Biden is to re-launch a version of the cancer "moonshot" effort, as GenomeWeb reports.
In 2016, President Barack Obama announced a national program aimed at curing cancer, which was to be led by Biden, then the vice president. Biden's son Beau had recently died from brain cancer and Biden wrote in an essay then published on Medium that the effort was "personal" for him.
With the re-launch, the Biden Administration has set a goal of reducing cancer death rates by 50 percent over the next 25 years, the Los Angeles Times says. A White House official tells ABC News that the COVID-19 pandemic has spurred the Administration to be ambitious. "The scientific advances that we saw from the COVID-19 pandemic, from the response to it, also points to things that are possible today," the official adds.
According to the administration, the effort is to focus on early diagnosis, cancer prevention, inequities, and personalized treatments, and more. The administration plans to re-establish White House leadership of the program as well as establish a "cancer cabinet" consisting of members from across federal agencies. CNN reports that Danielle Carnival is expected to be named the White House Cancer Moonshot coordinator.