Operation Warp Speed forever changed the landscape of drug approvals. This was a federal effort to accelerate the development of the COVID-19 vaccine created below President Trump
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Because I work in clinical development and understand how regulators work, at first I was skeptical about Operation Warp Speed. The ambitious goals, plans, and speed at which these companies attempted to develop, manufacture, and deliver new vaccines seemed impossible. But his success proved the model. Operation Warp Speed demonstrated that collaboration, transparency, and broad funding change games to create scientific advances.
Now, the same can happen with cancer treatment. And we’ve never had a president who was more committed to the history of cancer than Joe Biden
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After the death of his son Beau from glioblastoma in 2015, Biden became the country’s top cancer advocate. In 2016, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, he stated that he wanted to “end cancer as we know it.” He spent his last year as president barack Obama
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Now it can help make that dream come true. Biden is probably the most science-focused, results-oriented president in office. With his party in power in the House and Senate, Biden could put much more fuel on the rocket for cancer research. It’s time for his legacy to take the next step and launch an “advanced cancer operation” based on the learnings of Operation Warp Speed.
We are on the verge of exponentially turning cancer into a disease of the past and Biden has a chance to change the future of humanity by making cancer history. Here’s how:
1) Start a Warp Speed Operation for Cancer
In the race to combat COVID-19, regulators slowed down aging processes and renewed the way regulatory agencies analyze drug approvals. Allowing pharmaceutical companies, national health institutes and the Food and Drug Administration to cooperate in unprecedented ways.
The government encouraged participation in this vital public-private partnership by providing billions of dollars for vaccine research, manufacturing and distribution. It will be crucial to use this regulatory model to end cancer, mainly because cancer treatments are much harder to find than a simple vaccine. Cancer is complex. It changes and deceives the body’s immune system.
2) Fund major investments in research
In the United States, new cases of cancer are diagnosed every 30 seconds. Every year, more than 1.2 million Americans are diagnosed with cancer, in addition to the 20 million who are already fighting for their lives. Operation Trump Administration Warp Speed spent more than $ 12.4 billion on vaccine research and development. This partnership between the departments of Health and Human Services and Defense was successful due to funding.
The selection of candidate drugs that use different mechanisms to stimulate clinical activity against cancer, using artificial intelligence, machine learning, epigenetics and proteomics models, require massive funding. Drug manufacturers cannot do this independently, and academic institutions rely heavily on poorly paid postdoctoral researchers and philanthropy grants. Doing preclinical studies, transferring results to clinical trials, collecting safety data, and analyzing efficacy requires much more than volunteers and goodwill.
New technologies have the potential to unlock advances, but they are expensive and large-scale studies are expensive. That’s why Biden should create an “advanced cancer operation” and dedicate $ 20 billion to accelerating the development of new cancer treatments. It can have a seismic and historical impact when it finally kills cancer.
3) Push Americans to be screened for cancer
Because of the coronavirus, people stayed home, delaying their medical consultations and giving up proper care. The new cancer screening guidelines advise the public to examine cancers earlier, but pandemic alterations prevented the population from attending their doctor’s consultations over the past year.
Postponing medical treatment is not a good idea. The damage caused by viral outbreaks from last year’s medical research is immeasurable: clinical trials affected her enrollment, patients postponed surgeries and biopsies, and unfortunately many patients delayed treatment.
The National Cancer Institute estimates 1.8 million new cancer cases by 2020 and more than 600,000 cancer deaths in the United States alone. Screening is testing people to find cancer cells before it becomes an uncontrollable problem. When cancer is diagnosed early, people often show no symptoms, but many fear returning to medical services because of the coronavirus.
Finding some cancers at an early stage, before symptoms appear, can help decrease the chances of dying from these cancers. Cancers diagnosed in earlier stages are usually easier to treat and sometimes a cure is possible. Substantial increases in the number of preventable cancer deaths in America are to be expected as a result of diagnostic delays due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Urgent policy interventions are needed, in particular to manage the backlog of routine diagnostic services. Americans need to feel safe when they return to their medical care, they need to be screened for cancer and receive treatment. Biden can help with that.
Beyond my professional experience, cancer is personal to me: I lost my grandfather because of Glioblastoma, a type of aggressive brain tumor. When I was 12, my six-year-old cousin fell ill with a rare childhood lymphoma. When I was a teenager, my mother fought and survived uterine cancer. During the pandemic, I diagnosed my father with a rare immune system cancer that we still don’t cure. That’s why it’s so important to me and why I dedicated my career to researching better ways to treat this disease.
There can hardly be a nobler mission than ending cancer and Biden has a chance to lead that effort. The launch of a new Warp Speed operation for the development of advances in cancer patients could save millions of lives.
Dr. Leo Nissola is a physician and scientist in immunotherapy focused on the fight against advanced cancers with the immune system at the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy. Follow him on Twitter @LeoNissolaMD and @DoctorLeo on Instagram.