Vice President Joe Biden is outlining how he intends to pursue his "cancer moonshot" agenda after he leaves office next week.
The vice president, speaking at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco, Monday, said cancer is a bipartisan issue, and he offered to help the next administration carry on his mission to end the deadly disease. But he said he will also create an organization called the Biden Cancer Initiative; the primary focus will be collaboration between scientists so that research will be widely shared across specialties.
“Virologists, geneticists, chemical and biological engineers -- they weren’t all working in unison, but today we’ve reached an inflection point ... and the promise is enormous," Biden said.
Biden said the initiative will also concentrate on improving data standards to help researchers, work with community care organizations to improve access, and push pharmaceutical companies, insurance providers and biotech companies to make sure patients can afford treatments.
The subject hits home for the vice president, whose son, former Delaware Attorney General Beau Biden, died of brain cancer in May 2015.