In his final State of the Union address, President Obama announced a “new national effort” to put an end to cancer once and for all—and that effort will be led by Vice President Joe Biden, who last year tragically lost his son Beau to brain cancer at the age of 46.

“It’s personal for me,” Biden wrote in a statement released Tuesday night in conjunction with the president’s address. “But it’s also personal for nearly every American, and millions of people around the world. We all know someone who has had cancer, or is fighting to beat it.”

While the president’s brief remarks about the cancer-busting initiative were vague, Biden revealed in his statement that he has been meeting with researchers, philanthropists, and physicians for months to lay the groundwork for the plan. Last year, Biden personally lobbied for additional federal funding for cancer research. In December, the federal spending bill passed included a $264 million boost to the National Cancer Institute’s budget, which the vice president praised.

While it’s not the first time politicians have vowed to defeat cancer—including a similar call for action from Richard Nixon during his own State of the Union speech 45 years ago—Biden’s new effort is optimistic about making progress in light of advances in cancer immunotherapy, genomics, and combination therapies. Biden wrote that his goal is "to double the rate of progress," and while the details of doing so are still sketchy, Biden laid out two main goals: increase resources both private and public to cancer researchers; and improve communication between scientific and health communities.

According to STAT, cancer researchers who spoke with Biden’s aides last week reported that the vice president’s efforts were focused on solidifying a plan that can be firmly in place by the end of Obama’s term. Initial ideas for the plan included a national clinical data-sharing initiative and boosted federal support for gene sequencing.

"They are on a time crunch,” Dr. José Baselga, the president of the American Association for Cancer Research, told STAT. “They know that there is one year left of his administration. They had a sense of urgency.”