President Biden traveled to New Orleans this week to announce a $150 million investment in technologies to improve cancer surgeries. We check in on the progress of Cancer Moonshot.
LEILA FADEL, HOST:
President Biden, in his last months in office, is refocusing on one of his personal and professional missions – the Cancer Moonshot initiative. This week, he and First Lady Jill Biden were in New Orleans, announcing an additional investment of $150 million targeting at improving technologies for treatment.
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PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: The funding we announced today will help – will get these tools into the operating room, to visualize tumors right away, instead of having to wait for days or weeks and maybe reopen the patient to go back in.
FADEL: Joining us to discuss where things stand with the Cancer Moonshot is NPR consumer health correspondent Yuki Noguchi. Yuki, this is a program President Biden restarted after shutting it down for a few years. What’s changed?
YUKI NOGUCHI, BYLINE: Well, this has always been a personal issue for President Biden. He first launched it in the final days of the Obama administration, about a year after the death of his son Beau from brain cancer. And back in 2017, this had bipartisan support for funding, but then, of course, he had to halt work on this project while he ran for president. And this time, with the relaunch, things are different. The president still wants to cut cancer deaths in half in under 25 years, but the operation has to be leaner because he doesn’t have Republican congressional backing for lots of funding.
FADEL: OK, so what’s the shift in approach?
NOGUCHI: You know, Karen Knudsen, CEO of the American Cancer Society, said this time, the Moonshot is focusing on policy. The White House directed Medicare, for example, to pay for navigators to guide patients through cancer treatment and to cover the cost of things like colonoscopy screenings. She says both of these ultimately save money and lives.
KAREN KNUDSEN: This Moonshot reignited, from my perspective, is very different than the first Moonshot, because it did take this holistic whole-of-government, if you will, approach toward the cancer problem.
NOGUCHI: They’re also hoping a new federal research arm called the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, or ARPA-H, will help them focus on prevention, screening and treatment of cancer and other diseases, and they hope that also these will give these efforts continuity.
FADEL: Continuity, so meaning the work could continue regardless of who wins the presidential election.
NOGUCHI: You know, that’s part of it. Knudsen acknowledges that continuity of funding is important for researchers, but she says this new initiative is also trying to pick the low-hanging fruit like addressing the disparities and barriers that we know exist that keep patients from catching cancers earlier, when they’re easier and cheaper to treat.
FADEL: And what’s the significance of these investments been to date?
NOGUCHI: Well, Knudsen says U.S. cancer mortality has been falling, and a lot of that is because of improved screening, so she’s hopeful that measures like this week’s will continue that trend.
FADEL: NPR consumer health correspondent Yuki Noguchi. Thank you, Yuki.
NOGUCHI: Thank you, Leila.
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