In the words of Apollo 11 Mission Commander Neil Armstrong, many of us never envisioned man landing and walking on the moon, yet it happened. Just like the vision of the space race in the 1960’s, there is another race going on involving a heroic goal to win the war on cancer.
There are two ground breaking missions; one is called Cancer MoonShot 2020 which is led privately and is focuses on investigating the potential of combination immunotherapy as the next standard of care by leveraging the power of genomics and proteomics.
Genomics is an area that concerns the sequencing and analysis of an organism’s genome. Proteomics is a rapidly growing field of molecular biology that is concerned with the systematic high-throughput approach to protein expression analysis of a cell or an organism.
The National Cancer Moonshot program, which was tasked to Vice-President Joe Biden by President Obama in January 2016, aimed at pooling resources from multiple federal agencies and is focused on multiple initiatives (such as cancer prevention, early cancer detection, building an FDA Oncology Center of Excellence, cancer immunotherapy and combination immunotherapy, investing in high risk/high reward projects).
In April, 2016 the National Cancer Institute appointed Patrick Soon-Shiong, MD to the Blue Ribbon Panel, a group of scientific experts, cancer leaders, and patient advocates that will inform the scientific direction and goals of the National Cancer Moonshot program.
The anticipation and excitement for both of these ground-breaking missions is pardon the pun “out of this world.” Registry Partners will continue to follow the work of these two groups and continue to educate and update those involved with quality and healthcare outcomes as we cannot wait to see what the future brings for us. Stay tuned.