In State of the Union address, president calls for US to ‘cure cancer once and for all’, with Joe Biden at the helm of ‘a new moonshot’

Barack Obama has channeled John Kennedy’s space race with the Russians to pledge a new “moonshot”, led by vice-president Joe Biden at “mission control”, for the United States to win a new global health race and find a cure for cancer.

State of the Union 2016: Obama calls for 'new moonshot' to cure cancer – live Read more

“Last year, vice-president Biden said that with a new moonshot, America can cure cancer,” Obama said during a standout new policy moment during his final State of the Union address on Tuesday, referencing Biden’s remarks in announcing he would not run for president. “Last month, he worked with this Congress to give scientists at the National Institutes of Health the strongest resources they’ve had in over a decade.

“Tonight, I’m announcing a new national effort to get it done. And because he’s gone to the mat for all of us on so many issues over the past 40 years, I’m putting Joe in charge of Mission Control. For the loved ones we’ve all lost, for the family we can still save, let’s make America the country that cures cancer once and for all.”

Obama laid out the cancer challenge in a section of his address devoted to America’s “spirit of discovery”, making out Silicon Valley and US innovators to be a kind of successor to the American effort “when the Russians beat us into space”. The answer then, he said, was that “we built a space program almost overnight, and 12 years later, we were walking on the moon”.

Curing cancer, of course, will not happen overnight.

Inspired and led by Biden, who lost his eldest son, Beau, to brain cancer last year, the White House’s bold pledge follows the path laid forward by the vice-president when he declined to run to replace Obama in the White House.

“I’m going to spend the next 15 months in this office pushing as hard as I can to accomplish this,” Biden said from the White House Rose Garden in October. “Because I know there are Democrats and Republicans on the Hill who share our passion, our passion to silence this deadly disease.”

“If I could have been anything, I would have wanted to be the president that ended cancer,” Biden added. “Because it’s possible.”

Moments after Obama made the pledge, Biden published a memo on Medium promising to use the “moonshot” to “accelerate our efforts to progress towards a cure, and to unleash new discoveries and breakthroughs for other deadly diseases”.

“Over the next year, I will lead a dedicated, combined effort by governments, private industry, researchers, physicians, patients, and philanthropies to target investment, coordinate across silos, and increase access to information for everyone in the cancer community,” Biden wrote.

The vice-president is pushing for a two-pronged approach to defeating cancer: increasing resources to fight the disease; and breaking down divisions between drugmakers, insurers and doctors and “to work together, share information, and end cancer as we know it”.

“I know that we can help solidify a genuine global commitment to end cancer as we know it today,” Biden wrote, “and inspire a new generation of scientists to pursue new discoveries and the bounds of human endeavor.”

Hours before the president’s announcement, a coalition of drugmakers and insurers announced the formation of the Cancer MoonShot 2020, a group with the goal of speeding the development of new approaches to treating cancer.