On Tuesday, Vice President Joe Biden announced new actions to expedite progress toward eliminating cancer during the Cancer Moonshot Summit held at Howard University in Washington, D.C.
Here are 12 new actions being taken by the Cancer Moonshot Task Force and other federal agencies to facilitate progress in the fight to end cancer.
1. The National Cancer Institute will forge partnerships with more than 20 pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies to enhance cancer researchers' access to investigational agents and approved drugs.
2. The NCI and the White House Presidential Innovation Fellows will partner to increase access to cancer clinical trial information for both patients and oncologists.
3. The Department of Energy and NCI will launch three new pilot projects aimed at joining nearly 100 researchers, providers, computer scientists and engineers to employ the nation's most advanced supercomputing capabilities in the analysis of cancer data.
4. The NCI's genomic cancer data on patients will be doubled, bringing its total to 32,000 patients.
5. The Department of Veterans Affairs and the DOE will collaborate to use big data and precision medicine to improve cancer care for veterans.
6. The Food and Drug Administration will work to accelerate the development of cancer treatments, including drugs, biologics and devices.
7. The Patent and Trademark Office will accelerate the review of patent applications in selected cancer therapy fields.
8. The National Institutes of Health will partner with private and public institutes to fund cancer research and share the data generated by said research broadly to expedite the creation and delivery of new cancer therapies.
9. The NCI and the DOE will collaborate to accelerate the drug discovery process.
10. The FDA will increase its efforts to provide access to information on investigational cancer therapies for both physicians and patients.
11. CMS will enroll more than 3,200 oncologists in its Oncology Care Model, a multi-payer model created to incentivize high quality and high value cancer care.
12. The Department of Defense, the VA and NCI will collaborate to conduct state-of-the-art research to more rapidly identify unique targets and cancer pathways to facilitate detection and intervention.
More articles on quality:
US News changes quality measurements for upcoming hospital rankings: 5 things to know
Rehabilitation therapy doesn't reduce length of stay for ICU patients, study finds
Surgical intervention could mean survival for patients suffering deadliest form of stroke