Chatter at an early morning session on the third day of the 43rd annual meeting in Washington, D.C., was largely focused on the state of healthcare — and the survival, or repeal, of the Affordable Care Act — under the new President Trump administration.
A conversation about the state of healthcare at the Association of Community Cancer Centers’ annual meeting mostly focused on speculation over the Affordable Care Act’s future under the Trump administration. But the discussion shifted to the standing of the Cancer Moonshot Task Force, put in place during the final year of President Obama’s tenure.
Dr. Kavita Patel of the D.C.-based think tank The Brookings Institution and Dan Todd of Todd Strategy, both former Capitol Hill staffers, said any push for increasing the funding for cancer research will most likely come from agency heads, at the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the National Institutes of Health.
“There’s a commitment on Capitol Hill,” Todd said. “But the moonshot folks all went to work with former Vice President Biden. If there’s nobody [in the White House], it’s going to atrophy.”
The task force, helmed by former Vice President Joe Biden whose son, Beau, died of brain cancer in 2015, left D.C. the same day as the rest of the White House staff when President Obama left on Jan. 20. Today, it lives on as the nonprofit Biden Cancer Initiative, and the former vice president said the nonprofit’s work will focus on bringing down the cost of cancer treatments, enabling wider access to clinical trials, and supporting community oncology efforts.
Even before Obama and Biden left the White House, national cancer research received a boost. In December, the 21st Century Cures bill was passed into law. Through the law — the Capitol Hill commitment to which Todd referred — Congress appropriated $1.8 billion in new funding for cancer research.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
Whether President Trump’s White House will take up the mantle of moonshot cancer research is an uncertainty. Although former members of the Cancer Moonshot Task Force had spoken with the incoming administration about the research — which includes a conversation between Biden and his successor, Vice President Mike Pence, about continuing the work — the new White House’s proposed budget removes $6 billion in funding from the National Institutes of Health.
“Trump’s [administration] agreed to help continue some of those efforts,” Patel said. “Doing that but releasing a budget where you’re cutting the NIH by billions of dollars does not make sense to me.”
Photo: azerberber, Getty Images
