President Joe Biden will announce a new initiative Wednesday that he hopes will cut the nation’s cancer death rate in half by 2047.
Biden was tapped by Obama to spearhead the “Cancer Moonshot” program after Biden’s son Beau died of glioblastoma, an aggressive cancer of the brain, in 2015.
Now the president will revive this program in his new plan, in an effort to reduce the number of Americans lost to cancer.
The original goal of the program involved making “a decade’s worth of advances in cancer prevention, diagnosis and treatment” in five years, according to Obama’s 2016 State of the Union address.
Currently around $400 million of the $1.8 billion authorized by Congress for the program has remained unspent, and foundation that provides oversight to the program, the National Cancer Institute, says it has spent $1 billion on over 240 research projects.
Biden’s administration is not expected to make any new funding announcements, yet insist that “robust funding” will be available to the program, according to the New York Times.
Biden is expected to announce the renewed push for the Cancer Moonshot program at an event Wednesday that will host around 100 people, including cancer patients, caregivers, members of Congress and Vice President Kamala Harris.
Biden will state the program’s goal of cutting back cancer deaths by more than 50% over the next 25 years, and a major part of that goal is to promote early screenings for cancer, which can be incredibly important in cancer treatment since early detection can be the difference between life and death in many cases.
The President will also create a “cancer cabinet” to cut back on some of the bureaucracy involved in coordinating multiple government agencies, and he has tapped Danielle Carnival, a veteran of the original program, to oversee its revival.
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