Obama: Let’s cure cancer

“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 told Congress Tuesday night as he received a standing ovation.

Obama didn’t provide details on the effort, but he charged Biden with leading it, as the vice president has increasingly called for more cancer research after his son Beau died of brain cancer last year. Biden’s lately been talking about a “moon shot” to end cancer, prompting a group of biotech companies, drugmakers, doctors and researchers to form a coalition they’re calling Cancer MoonShot 2020.

“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,” Obama said.

In a separate online post, Biden outlined two major steps for the initiative: to increase public and private resources to fight cancer and to bring more “cancer fighters” together. The goal, the vice president wrote, is to double the rate of progress being made toward cures for cancer.

“The goal of this initiative — this ‘moonshot’ — is to seize this moment,” Biden wrote. “To accelerate our efforts to progress towards a cure, and to unleash new discoveries and breakthroughs for other deadly diseases.”

Biden said he’s starting things off this Friday by visiting doctors at the University of Pennsylvania medical school and later this month, with meetings with cabinet secretaries about how to further support cancer research.

Medical research has gotten a big boost over the last year, both from the executive branch and from Congress. Early in 2015, Obama announced a precision medicine initiative to gather a huge pool of genetic information researchers can use to develop targeted cures. In the spending agreement Congress agreed to last month, the National Institutes of Health is getting its biggest cash infusion in more than a decade.