Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center is expecting more research, more science and potentially greater insight into finding and treating cancers with a piece of President Biden's "Cancer Moonshot."
Cancer has been a big issue in Washington since the days of President Nixon and his "War on Cancer." The current president wants to cut the cancer death rate by at least 50% over the next 25 years.
It's personal with him, since he lost his son Beau to one of the most intractable cancers, the brain cancer glioblastoma. Rep. Brian Higgins (D-Buffalo) said there will be $6 billion for research, since some of this goes back to when he was Vice President Biden.
At Roswell Park, there have been major breakthroughs and more are coming.
"It's going to save lives and it's going to make an impact," said Roswell Park President and CEO Candace Johnson. "The whole country and all of us, Roswell Park especially, we're really poised for some really significant, out-of-the-box treatments, approaches, early detection and I think these funds are going to help us catapult this into practice."
Johnson said re-starting screening is a key.
"That we get screening levels back up and especially in disparate populations, where their primary care, sort of, networks were a little fuzzy anyway," Johnson said. "Many of those clinics and those avenues that folks had to be able to get the care that they needed has suffered during COVID. So, most definitely, we need to get all of those things back up and running so people are getting there routine screening."
COVID has wrecked the traditional pattern of screening, just as cancer hospitals and researchers have been able to persuade members of minority groups to make use of screening procedures like mammography and PSA testing. Screening has been the key to cutting the death rate for colon and cervical cancers.
