In less than two years than many had anticipated, life-saving vaccines were developed as a result of coordinated international efforts to combat the Covid-19 pandemic as reported by Forbes.
Fighting cancer
Could the same results be obtained from better coordination to fight cancer, which kills more people around the world annually than Covid?
Yes, emphatically says Dr Elizabeth Jaffee, a veteran of then Vice President Joe Biden’s Blue Ribbon Panel assembled as part of the Cancer Moonshot Initiative in 2016 to combat cancer.
“That’s coming out free, and that’s taking advantage of all the great investment in science — not just in the U.S. but worldwide and from people working together to come up with vaccines.”
“Look at how many different vaccines were developed.”
Most countries have come back to some form of normal life.
“When you think about that, it really hits you.”
Yet current leaders of the Biden administration’s Cancer Moonshot launched this year and tasked with getting results can start their new mission by asking a straightforward question: “What is needed?”
Technological revolution
“We’re in a technological revolution right now, right?
And then we have technologies that give us spatial information, so we can look at all those signals in one cell and see what signals in the cell next to it are expressing.
Maybe occasionally you get a little diversity but we need to do much better,” she said.
“People have them (data), but are they sharing?”
“Let’s be able to share information” to more quickly adapt treatments to varying patient needs, Jaffee said.
Big problem
Another problem: data storage is also a “big problem,” along with data analysis, Jaffee said.
And yet, she continued, “It’s not rocket science.”
“For instance, you have both private entities or public entities — you have all different entities that have pieces of this already and are doing some of this on a very small scale, and it takes forever to share,” Jaffee said.
“What we need are champions who are going to make it clear and make sure everyone benefits.
In a free market, I believe people should benefit.”
“I know at least when I worked with him, it’s really in here (his heart) that he wants to cure cancer,” Jaffee said.
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Source: Forbes
