Cancer moonshot misses the mark.

• Author: Bailey, Ronald
• Position: SCIENCE

IN 1971, RICHARD Nixon vowed "a national commitment for the conquest of cancer" as he signed the law establishing the National Cancer Institute (NCI). Forty-five years later, Barack Obama declared in his 2016 State of the Union address that our country would embark upon a "new moonshot" with the aim of making "America the country that cures cancer once and for all"; Vice President Joe Biden would be in charge of "mission control." In its October 17, 2016, report, the Cancer Moonshot Task Force declared that its goal is "to make a decade's worth of progress in preventing, diagnosing, and treating cancer in just 5 years."

How? The usual federal bureaucratic efforts of "catalyzing," "leveraging," and "targeting" are promised. But there is some meat to the proposals. For example, the NCI is creating a pre-approved "formulary" of promising therapeutic compounds from 30 pharmaceutical companies that will make them immediately available to researchers. In addition, the task force aims to establish open science computational platforms to provide data to all researchers on successful and failed investigations, and a consortium of 12 leading biotech and pharmaceutical companies are working together to identify and validate biomarkers for response and resistance to cancer therapies.

Prevention is also a focus. The moon-shot aims to save lives by boosting the colorectal cancer screening rate among Americans 50 and older and raising HPV vaccination rates for adolescents.

The...