It’s not easy to galvanize and unify the cancer research field on a national level, but that’s what Vice President Joe Biden has successfully done since he took the lead on the Moonshot Initiative six month ago. He has engaged people from all sectors, and empowered them to start thinking about better ways to work together. He has visited cancers center across the country — the Abramson Cancer Center (ACC) was first on the list— to listen and learn about the science and most importantly talk about the roadblocks many of his constituents — and he himself — feel are holding back progress.
In the latest jolt to the effort, he hosted the “National Cancer Moonshot Summit” at Howard University in Washington, DC, on June 29. The day-long seminar brought together over 350 experts from all corners of the cancer world — from researchers and physicians to patients and advocates to industry leaders and politicians — to spark new ideas and build relationships that will help achieve his ambitious plan: make a decade worth of progress in understanding, preventing, diagnosing and treating cancer and caring for patients in the next five years.
“The goal of the moonshot is to propel us forward today,” Biden said at the Summit. “I am in a position to say without being total naïve that we are on the cusps of breakthroughs that can get us there.”
Comedian Carol Burnett, whose daughter died of cancer, introduced Biden: “He knows cancer, he lived through cancer and he sees that if we fight it together, we can have a world without cancer as we know it," Burnett said of Biden, whose son Beau passed away from brain cancer. "I'm with you, Vice President Biden — we all are.”
Biden took the podium to energize the crowd and announce several of the 30 new initiatives coming out of the Moonshot, including new public-private partnerships, a program to get researchers better access to investigational agents, and a fast-track review process for treatment-related patents. The full list is posted on WhiteHouse.gov.
Chi Van Dang, MD, PhD, director of the ACC, and Susan Domchek, MD, executive director of the Basser Center for BRCA, attended that day, representing the Perelman School of Medicine and the ACC, known nationally for its preeminent research in immunotherapy, cancer vaccines, big data, precision medicine, and recurrence, among other areas.
“There's something different this time around,” said Dang, who in April was named to the Blue Ribbon Panel that will help inform the scientific direction of the Moonshot. “This is a really unique opportunity to invest in research, to think differently about how we conduct it and work together, to break down the silos, and ultimately speed up the pace of discoveries.”
In February, the White House requested $1 billion for the Moonshot, as part of the 2017 budget.
Biden ended his morning talk with words of encouragement, telling the crowd that it’s within their power to turn despair into hope. “We need you badly,” he said.
But the day wasn’t just about inspirational speeches; it was about jump starting this initiative—to make things happen. After Biden spoke, attendees broke out into working sessions that discussed everything from strategies for risk reduction of cancer to increasing the number of patients in clinical trials. Today, the number of patients who enter trials sits at an abysmal five percent. 
One of the new initiatives announced that day was a National Cancer Institute (NCI) and White House digital collaboration to help patients and oncologists better find and learn about clinical trials. The first phase will make cancer clinical data hosted on cancer.gov available through an application programming interface for advocacy groups, academia, and others in the cancer ecosystem to access directly. Officials hope opening up this data to the outside will have a ripple effect and spur innovation that will reach more patients.
Another issue Biden and many addressed is the red tape and silos encountered along the scientific path. Biden declared that he was the person for the job because he was adept at removing barriers and encourage sharing.
"The impediment isn't the lack of the gray matter genius and the ingenuity in terms of new drugs and new treatments, etc; it's all this stuff that gets in the way," Biden said. "The only thing I'm good at in government is getting things out of the way."
In other words, like he said in his Medium post back in January when this kicked off, he wants to clear the bureaucratic hurdles and “just let the science happen.”