WASHINGTON (AP) – Vice President Joe Biden will bring together scientists, oncologists, donors and patients for a national conference on cancer research in Washington, the White House said Tuesday.
Dubbed the “National Cancer Moonshot Summit,” the daylong conference is intended to galvanize Biden’s final-year push to double the pace of research toward curing cancer. The summit is scheduled for June 29 at Howard University, and the White House said it planned to organize dozens of regional summits on the same day in communities far from the capital.
Though there have been cancer conferences before, the White House said Biden’s summit will be the first to focus broadly on the more than 100 types of cancer, rather than on one specific form of the disease.
It will also be the first cancer summit with the government’s imprimatur, backed up by a federal task force that President Barack Obama established in January to drive further federal efforts toward a cure. The Health and Human Services Department will host the summit along with cancer advocacy groups, hospitals and politicians, the White House said.
Greg Simon, the former Pfizer Inc. executive running Biden’s cancer initiative, said the summit would emphasize strategies to prevent cancer, detect it early, ensure wide access to treatment and encourage researchers to share data.