President Joe Biden intimately understands the tragedy of losing a loved one to cancer. His eldest son Beau, a former Delaware attorney general, died of brain cancer at age 46 in 2015. 

Now, Biden has recommitted his administration to fulfill the promise of President Barack Obama’s “Cancer Moonshot” initiative—a plan directed at advancing the country’s progress in the battle against cancer by lowering cancer deaths by 50% by 2047. 

The American Cancer Society estimates that there will be 1,918,030 new cancer cases and 609,360 cancer deaths this year. Biden’s Moonshot program could save over 300,000 lives per year, a goal the administration is confident can be achieved, as the age-adjusted death rate from cancer has fallen by around 25% in the last 20 years. 

Although there was no immediate announcement involving adding funding for the initiative, Biden plans to assemble a “cancer cabinet” that will involve 18 federal departments, agencies, and offices, including leaders from the Departments of Health and Human Services, Veterans Affairs, Defense, Energy, and Agriculture. CNN reports that Biden is expected to name Dr. Danielle Carnival, who serves in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, as the Cancer Moonshot coordinator. 

The White House will also host a Cancer Moonshot Summit, “bringing together agency leadership, patient organizations, biopharmaceutical companies, the research, public health, and healthcare communities and more to highlight innovation, progress, and new commitments toward ending cancer as we know it,” and will launch a website to track the progress of the initiative’s mission.

The ultimate goal is to improve people’s treatment and outcomes, but also help improve the devastating economic cost for patients. According to an October report from the National Cancer Institute, in 2019, the national patient economic burden associated with cancer care was $21.09 billion, made up of patient out-of-pocket costs of $16.22 billion and patient time costs of $4.87 billion.

The Obama-era program launched in 2016 while Biden served as his vice president. Obama earmarked $1.8 billion over a seven-year period, with $400 million in funding still authorized for 2022 and 2023. At the time, Biden pledged that though he was “not naïve about the challenges ahead, he had “never been more optimistic that we can do big things.”

Biden was directed to lead Obama’s White House Task Force aimed at curing cancer. “I know we can do this. I truly believe it,” Biden wrote at the time. “And I want you to know that I’ll be focusing the rest of the time I have in office—and the rest of my life—on this effort.”

As untold Americans could be diagnosed with cancer as the COVID-19 pandemic has caused more than 9.5 million people to miss vital cancer screenings, Biden and First Lady Jill Biden will also deliver a call to action on cancer screenings “to jumpstart progress on screenings that were missed as a result of the pandemic, and help ensure that everyone in the United States equitably benefits from the tools we have to prevent, detect, and diagnose cancer.”

The White House says that the first lady’s advocacy for cancer education and prevention began in 1993 when four of her friends were diagnosed with breast cancer. 

Vice President Kamala Harris was deeply impacted by cancer as her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, was a breast cancer researcher who died of colon cancer in 2009.

“The progress in cancer research is slow—some of the fruits of Nixon’s 1971 declaration were only harvested with the development of the COVID mRNA vaccine,” Dr. Otis Brawley, a professor of oncology and epidemiology at Johns Hopkins University and former chief medical and scientific officer for the American Cancer Society told US News. 

Dr. Barron Lerner, a professor of medicine and population health at New York University Langone Health, tells US News that “hyperbolic goals” are great at encouraging the public, but he adds that actually achieving the 50% reduction is “extremely unlikely.”

“Similar past efforts like the ‘War on Cancer’ have made gains, but they have been more modest,” Lerner, the author of The Breast Cancer Wars, says. Adding that “Cancer is many diseases and requires very complicated research. Translating these advances to the clinical setting is never easy either.”