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Strategic plan
We have updated our Strategic plan to substantially reduce cancer deaths, see https://www.pathologyoutlines.com/ccnstrategicplan.html. It begins:
This strategic plan, created in February 2021, aims to substantially reduce cancer deaths in the United States from 600,000 projected for 2022 to 100,000 per year. After 50 years of fighting the War on Cancer (NCI: National Cancer Act of 1971, accessed 23Sep22), we need to "dare greatly" (The Man in the Arena 1910, retrieved 23Sep22), to determine our desired cancer related goals (Pernick: Let's cure cancer together 2021) and how we might attain them, even if many steps are unknown. Thus, our strategic plan differs from "challenge goals" that are based on "applying known interventions broadly and equitably" (Ma 2019).
We plan to discuss specific proposals in the plan in more detail in the future.
Cancer moonshot
On 12 September 2022, the 60th anniversary of President Kennedy's moonshot speech ("we choose the moon"), President Biden spoke at the Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston and outlined the progress on his cancer moonshot, https://www.npr.org/2022/09/12/1122480037/biden-cancer-moonshot.
The original goals of the cancer moonshot were to accelerate scientific discovery in cancer research, to foster greater collaboration and to improve the sharing of cancer data, https://www.cancer.gov/research/key-initiatives/moonshot-cancer-initiative. In February 2022, President Biden announced a new goal of reducing the cancer death rate by 50% within 25 years, echoing our own goal of substantially reducing U.S. cancer deaths from 600,000 to 100,000 annually.
As part of this effort, President Biden announced the creation of the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), which is aimed at driving biomedical innovation, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/12/us/politics/biden-cancer-arpa-h.html. It is intended to be nimble and flexible, a kind of “Shark Tank” for biomedical research, with employees who will take risks knowing that most projects will fail.
Congress has appropriated $1 billion for ARPA-H, which will be housed within the National Institutes of Health but report directly to the Secretary of Health and Human Services in order to minimize bureaucratic problems.
Cancer in African Americans
The American Cancer Society recently published Cancer Facts and Figures for African American/Black People 2022-2024. Although racial classification is a social construct based on appearance, it remains useful for describing health patterns in the US because long-standing structural racism has contributed to inequalities in the social determinants of health. Although some cancer-associated genetic mutations are inherited, most health differences between population groups do not stem from biology, but from variations in socioeconomic status and access to medical care. Collectively, African American/Black people have the highest death rates and shortest survival rates of any racial/ethnic group in the US for most cancers, largely driven by social mechanisms.
Prevention
Almost half of cancer deaths globally are caused by preventable risk factors, see
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(22)01438-6/fulltext
Cambridge cancer breakthrough may prompt rethink of metastasis
https://newatlas.com/medical/cancer-metastasis-breakthrough-rethink/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36175792/
Cancer death rate posts biggest one-year drop ever
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/01/08/cancer-death-rate-posts-biggest-one-year-drop-ever/
CCN administrative changes:
We now list our prior newsletters on the Newsletters page, see https://www.pathologyoutlines.com/ccnnewsletter.html
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What is your cancer plan?
What ideas do you think are most important to consider in order to substantially reduce cancer deaths? All ideas are welcome - email them to Nat@PathologyOutlines.com.
Latest versions of our documents:
Strategic plan (updated 28 September 2022)
American Code Against Cancer (how you can prevent cancer)
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