Moonshot Initiative Shows Promise As Advisory Panel Releases Recommendations

By Bio-IT World Staff

September 12, 2016 In a recent article published in Nature, science reporter Heidi Ledford discusses the specifics regarding a moonshot project that is being launched by the US government in a rush to treat cancer. An advisory board has recently released a list of projects and treatments that they believe to be important for government funding, to which the response has been generally positive.

The US Cancer Moonshot Initiative was launched in early 2016 to double the rate of progress in the fight against cancer in the next few years. The Moonshot is in accordance with President Obama’s Precision Medicine Investment. A panel of cancer researchers, physicians, and patient advocates serving as advisors to the Initiative have recently released a statement on recommended funding that would be most useful. According to Ledford’s report, “The ten recommendations released on 7 September include the launch of a national clinical-trial network specifically targeted at therapies that harness the immune system, and the creation of a 3D cancer atlas to catalogue how a tumor interacts with neighboring normal cells.”

According to Ledford, the list of recommendations has found favor with several specialists, including cancer geneticist Bert Vogelstein at Johns Hopkins. He was impressed by the number of “underexplored” opportunities the advisory panel laid out.

The big roadblock is the budget. Ledford says that $680 million has been requested by the US National Institutes of Health for the Initiative in the 2017 fiscal year. However, if a decision about the federal budget cannot be reached before the beginning of the fiscal year (October 1), then the funding will have to wait until 2018—and a new administration—to seek approval.

The budget restraints have lead to an issue with the logistics of the Initiative. Another article in Nature, written in April, reports that researchers are concerned with the bulk of projects and how that number will impact the effectiveness of the Initiative. The problem boils down to the fact that several of the proposed moonshot projects show a lack of innovation, said David Raulet, faculty director of the Immunotherapeutics and Vaccine Research Initiative at the University of California, Berkeley. “Many of these initiatives are moving forward ideas that are already out there.”

When so many cancer initiatives are seeking funds from the government’s moonshot, finding a clear and collaborative way to accomplish the goals launched by President Obama will be difficult. The goals become even more far-reaching when, according to Nature’s Erika Hayden, “The privately funded initiatives are more concerned with meeting their own goals — and satisfying their funders — than with coordinating efforts in the field.” It seems as though there is no ambition within the cancer research community to establish a definite resolution aside from the universally vague moonshot of improving the chances of curing cancer. This caused vice-president Joe Biden to ask at the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR)’s annual meeting in New Orleans, “Why is all of that being done separately?”

The mindset of individual ambitions has made its way to the there is dissention in the cancer research community in response to the broad focus of the advisory panel’s list of recommendations. Ledford mentions Francis Ali-Osman, a surgeon at Duke, who has criticized the list for not emphasizing disparities in cancer deaths. These disparities range from ethnicity to economic standings. In Ali-Osman’s words: “People are dying who shouldn't be dying.”

Ledford reports that the reason why the recommendations are seemingly narrow is because the advisory panel felt it necessary to focus on showing that they were able to produce, as noted by Johns Hopkins cancer researcher Elizabeth Jaffee; this is why the panel focused on the “shovel-ready or low-hanging fruit as the priority.”

While it is obvious that the Initiative has the long way to go if it’s going to be as effective as lawmakers and researchers have hoped, the advisory panel’s recommendations are favorable and moving in the right direction. Their decision to recommend underexplored but tangible projects for funding from the Initiative has impressed several members of the cancer research community, leaving the future bright for the Initiative’s goal of doubling the pace of cancer research in five years time.