NCI creates blue ribbon panel to help with cancer moonshot initiative

The NCI today unveiled members of a blue ribbon panel created to help implement the national cancer “moonshot” initiative.

The panel — comprised of clinical and pharmaceutical industry leaders, patient advocates, and experts in fields such as immunology, diagnostics and genomics — will serve as a working group of the presidentially appointed National Cancer Advisory Board offer guidance and insights that can help shape the scientific direction of the moonshot initiative.

“We are committed to breaking down silos and stimulating the groundbreaking work already underway,” Douglas Lowy, MD, acting director of NCI, said in a press release. “To be successful, we must hear a broad range of perspectives to take full advantage of the exceptional current opportunities in cancer research.”

President Barack Obama announced the launch of a national moonshot initiative to cure cancer during his State of the Union address in January. Vice President Joe Biden — whose son, Beau, died of brain cancer last summer — will lead the effort.

Members of the blue ribbon panel will consider how to advance proposed themes such as the development of cancer vaccines, highly sensitive approaches to early detection, advances in immunotherapy and combination therapies, single-cell genomic profiling of cancer cells and cells in the tumor microenvironment, enhanced data sharing, and new approaches to the treatment of pediatric cancers.

Members of the cancer community, as well as the public, will be given have a forum to post comments and insights intended to help the panel in its deliberations. Panel findings likely will be forwarded this summer to the National Cancer Advisory Board, which will then make recommendations to NCI. A final report by the White House Cancer Moonshot Task Force will be delivered to the president by Dec. 31.

“This blue ribbon panel will ensure that, as National Institutes of Health allocates new resources through the moonshot, decisions will be grounded in the best science,” Biden said in the press release. “I look forward to working with this panel and many others involved with the moonshot to make unprecedented improvements in prevention, diagnosis and treatment of cancer.”

Panel co-chairs are Tyler Jacks, PhD, chair of the National Cancer Advisory Board and director of Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Elizabeth Jaffee, MD, professor and deputy director for translational research at Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine; and Dinah Singer, PhD, acting deputy director and division of cancer biology director at NCI.

Other panel members are: Peter Adamson, MD; James Allison, PhD; David Arons, JD; Mary Beckerle, PhD; Mitch Berger, MD; Jeff Bluestone, PhD; Mikael Dolsten, MD, PhD; James Downing, MD; Levi Garraway, MD, PhD; Gad Getz, PhD; Laurie Glimcher, MD; Lifang Hou, MD, PhD; Neal Kassell, MD; Maria Elena Martinez, PhD; Deborah Mayer, PhD, RN; Edith Mitchell, MD, FACP; Augusto Ochoa, MD; Jennifer Pietenpol, PhD; Angel Pizarro, MSE; Barbara Rimer, DrPH; Charles Sawyers, MD; Ellen Sigal, PhD; Patrick Soon-Shiong, MBBCh; Chi Van Dang, MD, PhD; and Wai-Kwan Alfred Yung, MD.

Members of the research community can subscribe to updates from the blue ribbon panel by going to www.cancer.gov/research/key-initiatives/moonshot-cancer-initiative or by emailing cancerresearch@nih.gov.