U.S. Vice President Joe Biden has released another cancer progress report/wish list:
Vice President Joe Biden today released his vision for doubling progress against cancer over 5 years. It includes numerous policy recommendations and a laundry list of projects by the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and other federal agencies that would require additional funding. Biden and his wife, Jill, have met with thousands of experts and patient advocates, they explain in a 17-page strategic plan submitted to President Barack Obama, who asked Biden in January to lead the effort. "We sought to better understand and break down the silos and stovepipes that prevent sharing of information and impede advances in cancer research and treatment, while building a focused and coordinated effort at home and abroad," they explain.
The Bidens' wish list ranges from giving patients more control over their medical data to launching "a national conversation" about cancer drug pricing. They also want to see more high-risk research funding at NCI and changes to the institute's intramural research program to focus more on emerging science and major public health challenges.
An accompanying 29-page report from Biden's federal moonshot task force lists what agencies have done so far and their plans to address five strategic goals. The first goal, "catalyze new scientific breakthroughs," contains several items that "align with" the 10 research areas recommended last month by an NCI blue ribbon panel, the report says. For example, it describes Department of Defense (DOD) efforts to develop new imaging technologies for detecting early molecular changes in cells that may lead to cancer.
The Cancer Moonshot is part of the War on Cancer:
The mission of this Cancer Moonshot is not to start another war on cancer, but to win the one President Nixon declared in 1971. At that time, we didn't have the army organized, didn't have the military intelligence to know the enemy well, and therefore didn't have the comprehensive strategy needed to launch a successful attack—now we do. Because of the progress over the last 45 years we have an army of researchers and oncologists, the powerful technologies and weapons, and immense public support and commitment to action.
Related:
Biomedicine Facing a Worse Replication Crisis Than the One Plaguing Psychology
The White House Announces $121 Million Microbiome Initiative
"Cancer Moonshot" Releases Blue Ribbon Panel Report
Microsoft to "Solve the Problem of Cancer" Within Ten Years - Scientists are Skeptical
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In February, the White House announced its plan to put $1 billion toward a similar objective—a "Cancer Moonshot" aimed at making research more techy and efficient. But recent studies of the research enterprise reveal a more confounding issue, and one that won't be solved with bigger grants and increasingly disruptive attitudes. The deeper problem is that much of cancer research in the lab—maybe even most of it—simply can't be trusted. The data are corrupt. The findings are unstable. The science doesn't work.
In other words, we face a replication crisis in the field of biomedicine, not unlike the one we've seen in psychology but with far more dire implications. Sloppy data analysis, contaminated lab materials, and poor experimental design all contribute to the problem. Last summer, Leonard P. Freedman, a scientist who worked for years in both academia and big pharma, published a paper with two colleagues on "the economics of reproducibility in preclinical research." After reviewing the estimated prevalence of each of these flaws and fault-lines in biomedical literature, Freedman and his co-authors guessed that fully half of all results rest on shaky ground, and might not be replicable in other labs. These cancer studies don't merely fail to find a cure; they might not offer any useful data whatsoever. Given current U.S. spending habits, the resulting waste amounts to more than $28 billion. That's two dozen Cancer Moonshots misfired in every single year. That's 100 squandered internet tycoons.
After focusing on cancer, the brain, and personalized medicine, the Obama Administration is now zooming in on the bustling microbial communities within us, on us, and all around us in our built and natural environments.
On Friday, the White House revealed the Microbiome Initiative, a nationwide project to coordinate and fund microbiome research. The federal government is investing $121 million into the program. Several agencies will chip into that number, including NASA, the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, and the US Department of Agriculture. Additionally, more than 100 external organizations will add more money and projects to the pot, including $100 million in funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
The initiative has three main goals: to fund interdisciplinary microbiome research, develop technologies that can be used across different research projects, and support a microbiome research workforce.
ArsTechnica is calling it a "moonshot." Does $121 million rate that comparison?
A panel of experts working on the Obama administration's "cancer moonshot" (announced during the President's State of the Union address) recommend a greater focus on immunotherapy. Their report includes these ten summarized recommendations (bonus videos at link):
- Network for direct patient engagement
- Cancer immunotherapy clinical trials network
- Therapeutic target identification to overcome drug resistance
- A national cancer data ecosystem for sharing and analysis
- Fusion oncoproteins in pediatric cancer
- Symptom management research
- Prevention and early detection: implementation of evidence-based approaches
- Retrospective analysis of biospecimens from patients treated with standard of care
- Generation of human tumor atlases
- Development of new enabling cancer technologies
"The goal is to focus investigators into these areas because this is where we feel we can make huge progress in the next five years as opposed to the next 10 years," Berger said. In addition to the 10 scientific approaches that the Blue Ribbon Panel recommended, there are additional special projects. These include a demonstration project to test for Lynch syndrome, a heritable genetic condition that increases risk of several types of cancer, to improve early detection and prevention; the establishment of a nationwide pediatric immunotherapy clinical trials network to enhance the speed with which new immunotherapies can be tested in children; exploring patient-derived organoids; and "microdosing" devices to test drug responses in living tumors.
"It feels like exactly the right time to be launching a big new push against cancer," said Alan Ashworth, PhD, FRS, president of UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center. "The report of the Blue Ribbon Panel is bold and imaginative and, if properly funded and implemented, will allow major progress in a considerably accelerated time frame."
Also at The Washington Post and NBC.
Cancer Moonshot Blue Ribbon Panel Report 2016 Draft (72 page PDF)
Microsoft has vowed to "solve the problem of cancer" within a decade by using ground-breaking computer science to crack the code of diseased cells so they can be reprogrammed back to a healthy state.
[...] The researchers are even working on a computer made from DNA which could live inside cells and look for faults in bodily networks, like cancer. If it spotted cancerous chances it would reboot the system and clear out the diseased cells.
Chris Bishop, laboratory director at Microsoft Research, said: "I think it's a very natural thing for Microsoft to be looking at because we have tremendous expertise in computer science and what is going on in cancer is a computational problem.
[Continues...]
The 21st Century Cures Act, a bill to provide billions of dollars of funding to the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Federal agency responsible for biomedical research, sailed through the US House of Representatives last week with a rare showing of strong bipartisan support. It is expected to pass the US Senate and to be signed by President Obama, a strong backer, later this month.
The $4.8 billion in funding for NIH is targeted at three areas: cancer research (as in Joe Biden's "cancer moonshot"), brain research (including Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and PTSD) and precision medicine (treatment informed by patient genomes).
However, $3.5 billion in funding of the bill will be redirected from Obamacare's Prevention and Public Health Fund, which is chartered to research Alzheimer's and other infectious diseases, so it could be argued that the bill reduces the Federal government's commitment to Alzheimer's research.
While the NIH employs thousands of researchers, most of the new funds are expected to be distributed to researchers at universities, hospitals, and other external labs.
The bill also authorizes $1 billion to fight the nation's opioid crisis, and $500 million in additional funding for the Federal Drug Administration (FDA).
As part of the compromise needed to attract Republican support, the bill loosens the guidelines on the FDA needed to approve a new drug or medical device; the industry and some patient advocates have complained about red tape in getting new drugs approved. However, the new approach has troubled some doctors who have followed the legislation.
Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Bernie Sanders (I-VT) have attacked the bill as a giveaway to the pharmaceutical and medical device industries, at the expense of the health of consumers and patients. Some conservative groups also oppose the bill as a waste of public funds.
Legislation text; political analysis from StatNews.
(Score: 2) by Username on Tuesday October 18 2016, @09:19PM
On first glance I was expecting them to send cancer patients to the moon as short lived habitat test subjects, but unfortunately, it’s just feelsgood snake oil.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Tuesday October 18 2016, @09:45PM
"The bad news about your throat cancer is you've got only 9 months to live, and your ability to swallow food will be severely affected. The good news is that Elon Musk would really like you to consider making history"
(Score: 2) by davester666 on Wednesday October 19 2016, @03:36AM
I'm not sure what the point of doubling the number of people with cancer does, other than cause more problems for our health care system.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday October 19 2016, @03:24PM
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Dunbal on Tuesday October 18 2016, @09:20PM
And in the fine print the rights to all this information will belong to "All Mankind"? I don't think so. You're going to pay for it, and someone else is going to make serious bank.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 18 2016, @09:27PM
I think it's time we stopped listening to the lies.
Government keeps making promises, but has shown it is fundamentally incapable of delivering. I don't see how that can be fixed.
Pharmaceutical companies are in bed with government. Face it, if even try to invent the cure for cancer in your basement, the FDA will bust down your door, and haul your ass to gaol for running a meth lab before you unpack your test-tubes. What the hell happened to innocent until proven guilty?
The way to get breakthroughs in medicine is to break down the constraints that prevent us from experimenting at home. The crack-heads can go off themselves, I don't see why the rest of humanity should suffer just so that the gubmint can protect idiots from themselves. The terrorists, are also welcome to go off themselves. But what about the children? Yes, just let them die ... from cancer.
Sick of it.
The only ones who are going to do it are us. All that artificially expensive "medical" equipment is only expensive because of patents, and "licensing".
Actually, screw it. Someone in China, or India, or some other less protectionist country will get their hands on the equipment, and join the dots. The US should just get used to falling behind, just as the Kingdom's of Europe found out. Royalties / Patents stifle innovation. Those huge costs exist because of previously granted "Patents" plus the costs of "Regulatory" compliance.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by tibman on Tuesday October 18 2016, @11:26PM
I get where you're coming from but test equipment has pretty much always been expensive. It's low-volume and high-precision. Of course the price is high. As far as garage labs being a problem, that might be a local (State) issue you have. There are quite a lot of hacked together labs. Sci-plus can sometimes have decent labware if you are interested: https://www.sciplus.com/s/c_11 [sciplus.com]
Hell, to a layperson, a beer brewing session could look like a methlab. If your neighbors are nosy spies it seems best to give them just enough information to judge you. That's all they want to do anyways. If you are too private they'll just assume you're a drug dealer or terrorist or something. Thankfully i live on a bit more land now and most of the neighbors respect the property borders. OT: except one.. i am contemplating building a wall on that boundary.
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 2) by jdavidb on Tuesday October 18 2016, @09:33PM
Vice President Joe Biden today released his vision for doubling progress against cancer over 5 years
Does he know he's only on the clock till next January 20th?
I remember it was Rush Limbaugh who taught me ~20 years ago to notice the fact that politicians with 4 year terms always make 5 year plans that don't expect any progress until the 5th year. No longer a fan of Limbaugh but I've always remembered this fact.
Of course, typically the 5 year promises are made on the campaign trail, not during the last few months of the administration.
ⓋⒶ☮✝🕊 Secession is the right of all sentient beings
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Tuesday October 18 2016, @10:01PM
Does he know he's only on the clock till next January 20th?
It's just part of Obama's legacy. None of the quotes mean anything except in that convoluted managementspeak way where the sentences almost make sense.
The sycophantic media will spend February extolling Obama as the best president since Lincoln. (At least they will where I live, it's not the US, but we're part of the 5 eyes, so we have to play nice).
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday October 18 2016, @10:13PM
Even a Republican president is likely to fund most of what the NHS does (aside from a few cloning/stem cell/germ line modification items), and would probably follow the non-controversial recommendations here. So I don't see what the problem is.
And if a Democratic candidate wins, that's three terms in a row, and easy funding for the Cancer Moonshot.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday October 18 2016, @09:40PM
My view is that a "moonshot" is a terrible model to begin with. Spending gobs of money to achieve something that can only be achieved by spending gobs of money is not going to result in progress on cancer for any other than perhaps a lucky few (just like twelve astronauts got to be the lucky few to make it to the Moon).
And the goals of this particular strategy paper are so vague and unambitious as to be meaningless even in the context of "moonshot". If we spend $100 billion (in the neighborhood of what was spent on Apollo) we can "expand access to care" or "create new financial models"? Ugh.
You know what I think would be a worthy goal? Generic longevity such as: in 50 years, have the expected life span of people living at the time be over 200 years (obviously, you would be unable to directly measure such an improvement without waiting the appropriate length of time, but at least it's a worthy goal). And one would have to fix most types of cancer, heart disease, infectious disease, etc in order to achieve that goal.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 18 2016, @09:52PM
Except you don't need any more research to improve your longevity by more than almost every prescription medicine ever invented.
1. Quit smoking.
2. Lose weight (Normal BMI - don't get me started on how crap BMI is, but the facts still works. BMI overweight athletes, are statistically insignificant - and YOU are NOT part of that demographic)
3. Exercise 30 minutes a day.
4. Eat a Mediterranean diet, including fresh vegetables, olive oil, fish, meat, and red wine.
That's better than all known cancer treatments + all cholesterol / heart medication.
If you are doing all of the above, then I would love to know what to do next, because I'm still working on this list perfect, before the relatively tiny benefits of whatever else you can suggest will provide.
(Score: 2) by Dunbal on Tuesday October 18 2016, @11:14PM
Throw away science let's all work on anecdotal evidence.
Your "diet" works perfectly well for you because you're relatively healthy. Thus you are suffering from a bad case of selection bias. Unfortunately there are people in this world who are not healthy through no fault of their own. They need medication on top of the steps you describe to even hope to achieve a "normal" life.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 18 2016, @11:34PM
I'm not the original anon, but want to point out that NHST is pseudoscience not science (disproving a default null hypothesis rather than your hypothesis). It basically allows you to "prove" or "discover" whatever you want. NHST is what has been used by medical researchers for the last few decades, and lead to the 10-30% replication rate (which doesn't even address misinterpreted results...). I would agree with anon that anecdotes and common sense are much better than what is currently being called medical research.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Dunbal on Tuesday October 18 2016, @11:58PM
I won't argue that point. The point I was trying to make is that most people are relatively healthy, somewhere around the center of the bell curve. As a physician myself I've seen what lies on either extreme of the curve - it's what I deal with every day. Telling THOSE people who through unfortunate genetics or unhappy accident have to lead a deficient life that they would have stayed healthy had they followed OP's recommendations is tantamount to a slap in the face. I think we've moved past the ancient belief that illness is caused by evil spirits and demons, and we also need to move past believing that illness is some sort of punishment. There are people who can smoke their whole lives and NOT get cancer or cardiovascular disease, for instance. However I'm not willing to put my reputation on the line and tell people not to worry about their smoking - because most people DO get sick from it. Exercise and diet is only PART of the answer. Another part lies within the individual organism. And yet another is just chance.
However there are many cases where drugs DO help those who are sick. I'll admit that not all drugs are helpful, and I will even go as far as to say that pharmaceutical companies have a vested interest in skewing their results or outright lying and cheating - some have already been caught. However as a physician dealing with the sick it's not really my place to abandon all those sick people and dedicate all my resources to actually figure out if the snake oil I'm taught about actually works as advertised. That's a whole different career path. As long as I see patients claiming to feel better with treatment, I will take them at their word and continue to prescribe that treatment to others. At the end of the day, even the placebo effect is real.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday October 19 2016, @04:06PM
NHST has its place, particular with a complex system (such as the human body) for which you don't have an adequate model. You can shotgun a huge bunch of parameters to find correlations that reveal viable models of the system. But to successfully do so, you need to realize that most such correlations will be spurious and have a reliable way to rule out those spurious correlations.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 20 2016, @03:52AM
Yes, because there really is a difference. The only use for "discovering" this over and over is to jump to some invalid conclusion.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday October 20 2016, @02:11PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 20 2016, @02:40PM
Then you have no hypothesis to test. At that point your job is to describe the situation/phenomenon as carefully as possible.
There is no legitimate point to checking if there is exactly zero correlation or zero difference between two sets of subjects unless this is predicted by someones model. This idea that there is a proper use for NHST and people are just misusing it is a common one, but it is baseless. There is no legitimate use for testing a hypothesis not predicted by anyone's model, only misuses are possible. See for example this link, where it is discussed that the founders of those methods also need to misuse the outcome of NHST when trying to put their methods into practice: http://andrewgelman.com/2016/09/10/my-talk-at-warwick-england-230pm-thurs-15-sept/ [andrewgelman.com]
Everyone misuses it because that is the only thing to do with it. At best, it is a waste of time that clutters up research reports with irrelevancies.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday October 20 2016, @03:28PM
Then you have no hypothesis to test.
Hypotheses are not models. It's not at all hard to construct hypotheses of the form, "this parameter correlates with that parameter".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 20 2016, @03:46PM
1) That is not the hypothesis being tested by NHST. It is that there is zero correlation and the statistical model accurately describes the distribution of uncertainty. Ie it is the logical inverse with additional content.
2) I would call that a prediction, not a hypothesis, but ok.
3) Such "hypotheses" are too vague to be of any use. It amounts to saying an observation was consistent with a prediction that literally includes all possible outcomes except an infinitesimally small proportion at exactly zero. For a prediction to be useful it needs to allow us to meaningfully narrow down the possible reasons for whatever observation we are trying to explain.
This type of stuff has all been explained before by people better than me. For example, figure 3 here:
Paul Meehl. 1990. Appraising and Amending Theories: The Strategy of Lakatosian Defense and Two Principles That Warrant It. Psychological Inquiry 1990, Vol. 1, No. 2, 108-141. http://rhowell.ba.ttu.edu/meehl1.pdf [ttu.edu]
The sad truth is that so much money, time, and effort has been wasted on NHST that people have a mental block to accepting how bad it is. Just accept it: we need to redo almost everything since 1980, and a lot of stuff since 1950. Many highly intelligent people wasted their lives on pseudoscience, but I guess that's life. Try it out, the tension between logic and your worldview will disappear.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday October 20 2016, @06:10PM
That is not the hypothesis being tested by NHST. It is that there is zero correlation and the statistical model accurately describes the distribution of uncertainty. Ie it is the logical inverse with additional content.
Sure, it's the negation of the hypothesis that's being tested.
I would call that a prediction, not a hypothesis
And I would call that meaningless word mincing that adds nothing to your argument.
Such "hypotheses" are too vague to be of any use.
Except of course, when you're wrong, which incidentally would be most of the time (except for really trivial correlations like X with X+constant which we would already know correlate in a known way via math). Then they aren't too vague to be of use.
It amounts to saying an observation was consistent with a prediction that literally includes all possible outcomes except an infinitesimally small proportion at exactly zero. For a prediction to be useful it needs to allow us to meaningfully narrow down the possible reasons for whatever observation we are trying to explain.
The exceptions are not infinitesimal.
The sad truth is that so much money, time, and effort has been wasted on NHST that people have a mental block to accepting how bad it is.
Just because a tool is misused doesn't mean that it doesn't work when used in a different manner (an "appropriate" manner, of course).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 20 2016, @06:12PM
Meh, you didn't really read any of my post. Maybe I will try again another day.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday October 20 2016, @08:02PM
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Snotnose on Tuesday October 18 2016, @10:38PM
The moonshot was an engineering problem, while difficult still solvable.
Cancer is basic research. No telling how long it will take to learn something when we aren't even sure what to research and in what order.
As the first post said, this is feelsgoodism to the nth degree.
Relationship status: Available for curbside pickup.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 18 2016, @09:55PM
Don't worry everyone, president Camabama has a three point plan that will fix everything.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 18 2016, @10:03PM
Most of this was already discussed earlier [soylentnews.org].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 18 2016, @11:40PM
Let's get rid of it! [youtube.com]
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 19 2016, @08:58PM
He can't just authorize a drone strike on cancer?