West Virginia University (WVU) will receive $730,000 per Vice President Joe Biden’s Cancer Moonshot Initiative. Biden released the first report on the initiative establishing the Cancer Moonshot Taskforce on Monday, October 17.
The Task Force was created to focus on making private sector and federal investments, and to provide other incentives to support cancer studies and speed up progress in care and treatment development.
Technology, prevention, treatment, and public-private partnerships were discussed as the most notable project areas. However, the Cancer Moonshot still faces a lack of funding. Some congressional reps have predicted the House will come back with between one half and two thirds of the $10 billion being asked for.
Hillary Clinton expressed her support for the Cancer Moonshot Initiative, saying, “We know more than we ever have about the biology of cancer, how to prevent it, and how to treat it. We need to do more to build on these developments, advance our understanding, and develop more effective treatments.”
“Cancer does not discriminate and I believe leaders of both parties can come together to tackle this disease as part of a comprehensive effort to improve medical research,” said Clinton.
The $730k was awarded earlier this week to the WVU Cancer Institute and three other partnerships to “implement and evaluate an innovative model of comprehensive, coordinated care to better meet the needs of lung cancer survivors and their caregivers.”
The Mary Babb Randolph Cancer Center (MBRCC) at WVU is comprised of health facilities and practices offering a variety of services for patients in the state. It’s nationally recognized for its exceptional healthcare in cancer treatment, prevention, and research.
MBRCC is focused on lung, breast, prostate, and colon/rectal cancer. Its multidisciplinary team of physicians, researchers, and other healthcare experts collaborate to devise treatment plans that are individualized to best suit each patient and to achieve the most favorable results.
The physicians at MBRCC base their plan of action on factors such as diagnosis, staging, and test results. Board-certified thoracic surgeons are specially trained to perform various surgical procedures for mesothelioma and several thoracic cancers and diseases.
WVU’s program offers interdisciplinary, patient-centric survivor care services to lung cancer patients who finish active treatment. It’s called “Bridge to Good Living: Thriving beyond Lung Cancer.”
The program will be implemented with the help of co-investigators Dr. Patrick Ma, Associate Professor and Eminent Scholar in Lung Cancer Research, and Anne Swisher, Professor in the Division of Physical Therapy.
