Biden, Cancer Groups Call for Collaboration to Hasten Advances

Vice President Joe Biden called on cancer researchers and health organizations to set aside individual goals in treatment and research to work together on fighting the second-leading cause of death in the U.S.

Advances against the disease that kills more than half a million Americans every year will come faster if doctors, researchers and groups like the American Society of Clinical Oncology pool their efforts, Biden said at the annual meeting of ASCO, the largest gathering of cancer doctors in the world. Breakthroughs in detection and treatment are among the goals of the National Cancer Moonshot Initiative that Biden announced in January after the death of his son Beau from brain cancer. Earlier Monday, he announced a public database at the University of Chicago to compile “vast troves” of genomic data to improve research and individual patient outcomes.