In his final State of the Union address Tuesday, President Obama pledged to make America the nation that cures cancer, and turned to Vice President Joe Biden to lead the charge.
Biden committed to a "moonshot" to find a cure for the disease after his son and former Delaware Attorney General Beau Biden died from brain cancer at age 46 last spring.
Since then, cancer has overtaken heart disease as Delaware's top cause of death. And the Vice President has pushed through the biggest boost for federal cancer research in a decade, as part of a $2 billion allocation to the National Institutes of Health.
"If you can have all this data at one time, this can be extremely useful in designing more streamlined therapy."
One area Biden is focusing on in drawing up a plan for his moonshot is genome sequencing for use in personalizing cancer medicine.
Leading Delaware cancer doctor Raj Rajasekaren says that could become a way to head cancer off where it starts.
"If you have this done for thousands of patients, and you have a huge database of having genetic material with the particular mutation, and then what kind of treatment that particular patient's got, and what is the outcome -- if you can have all this data at one time, this can be extremely useful in designing more streamlined therapy," he says.
Rajasekaren says a database like that would be a game changer for doctors, but will require some big policy changes, too. Biden has reportedly been talking with FDA regulators as part of his moonshot launch. Rajasekaren says sharing the data that comes of genome sequencing, while protecting patient privacy, will be an obstacle.
But he says it's been done on smaller scales for certain types of cancer before.
"We'll be able to say, okay, if you have this particular genome, you may not respond to this particular treatment."
"Once we start with personalized treatment, you're going to have tons and tons of data, and that data will at some point -- probably in the next generation of kids -- we'll be able to say OK, if you have this particular genome, you may not respond to this particular treatment, you probably need a different treatment."
Rajasekaren helped found the cancer center at Alfred I. DuPont Hospital for Children. He says juvenile cancer poses a more solvable problem right now than adult cancer.
"The reason is, the kids' cancer evolved because the dividing cells failed to differentiate into adult cells, and they continuously divide. At that stage ... it looks like the cancer is easily treatable," he says. "In adults, what happens is all of our cells have become adult cells. But when it becomes cancerous, it goes back to the kids' cell stage. ... When they go back to that state, they have already accumulated so many mutations ... that it becomes very resistant to a lot of treatments."
Still, he says the more data they can share about those mutations -- and other aspects of genetics, like cell proteins -- the easier it'll be to treat or even eradicate more types of cancer more quickly.
