National Cancer Institute
Expand Use of Proven Cancer Prevention and Early Detection Strategies – Blue Ribbon Panel 2016
Reduce cancer risk and cancer health disparities through approaches in development, testing and broad adoption of proven prevention strategies. Get more information at http://go.usa.gov/xWt9T.
What is the Cancer Moonshot?
During During his State of the Union address on January 12, 2016, President Barack Obama announced the establishment of a new Cancer Moonshot to accelerate cancer research. The initiative—led by Vice President Joe Biden—aims to make more therapies available to more patients, while also improving our ability to prevent cancer and detect it at an early stage.
What is the Blue Ribbon Panel?
To ensure that the Cancer Moonshot's goals and approaches are grounded in the best science, President Obama directed the Moonshot Task Force to consult with external experts, including the presidentially appointed National Cancer Advisory Board (NCAB). A Blue Ribbon Panel of experts was established as a working group of the NCAB to assist the board in providing this advice.
The move towards thinking about prevention in my view is extremely important and it’s not just one thought. Prevention can include cessation; it can include improved use of colorectal screening methods. But it also in the future will include interventions that reduce an individuals’ risk. Imagine for example, better vaccines that can significantly reduce the likelihood that an individual will develop a particular type of cancer? This is already a reality in the case of virally induced cancers, HPV induced cancers. But in the future I predict that we’ll have methods like that for other types of cancers. Here's the fundamental challenges: We know that about half of all cancers could be prevented. But right now we're not able to fully capitalize on the wealth of information that can allow us to identify the people who could most benefit from prevention strategies. So imagine, if we knew uh, what people in our population carried uh, a high risk gene for a particular type of cancer? Those folks then could be advised about screening, their relatives could be identified and through those kinds of technologies we could basically eliminate that type of cancer. We are recommending to implement uh, evidence based guidelines. Lots of research goes behind these guidelines. In some populations specifically those that do not have the means to get to a physician, to get to a hospital, who don’t have health insurance, these guidelines don’t get implemented. Some of it has to do with educating the community, making sure they're part of the implementation of these guidelines and that they're at the forefront of moving this forward, absolutely.
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