The Emerging Bipartisan Cancer Coalition? "Nothing Beyond Our Capacity" Biden Is Right About Curing Cancer (and Genetics Are The Way To Do It)

But it won't be the academics who get it done...

There’s a meme going around from the Daily Wire, mocking President Joe Biden for talking about cancer.

Daily Wire @realDailyWire

Biden: *whispers* "If I could wave a wand, I'd cure cancer. Why? Because no one believes it can be done. But we're starting to do it."

We’ve already talked about the Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro is a Chisraeli front, backed by the Wilks brothers who sold their oil fracking company to the Chinese. Naughty, naughty, Benjy. You should be forced to register under FARA, or perhaps as a toxic pollutant. Disclose your Chinese-compromised donors, Ben! Do it.

Mocking Biden notwithstanding it’s actually quite easy to cure cancer. You just need large amounts of genetic data to do it. At $200 a person that’s easy. The technology is now ready — if we have the courage to ignore the Pharma greed.

Here’s how Professor Steve Hsu talks about it:

Hsu writes:

Someone asked me to comment more on clinical applications of polygenic risk scores. Here's what we say in the paper, using the specific example of breast cancer (emphasis added):

There is already signifcant interest in the application of PRS in a clinical setting, for example to identify high risk individuals who might receive early screening or preventative care [2, 13–24]. As a concrete example, women with high PRS scores for breast cancer can be offered early screening: already standard of care for those with BRCA risk variants [25, 26]. However, BRCA mutations affect no more than a few women per thousand in the general population [27–29]. Importantly, the number of (BRCA negative) women who are at high risk for breast cancer due to polygenic effects is an order of magnitude larger than the population of BRCA carriers [2, 10, 30–34]. From this one example it is clear that significant medical, public health, and cost benefits could result from PRS (e.g. [35]). It is well known that patients with atherosclerotic diseases, coronary artery disease (CAD), and lung diseases can benefit from early intervention [36–38]. ... Precision genetics is already used in identification of candidates for early intervention, and will become widespread in the near future (cf. Myriad’s riskScore test and other examples [33, 34]). In figure 4, we illustrate the predicted risk of breast cancer and coronary artery disease as function of age for high, medium and low risk groups, respectively.

Elsewhere Hsu estimates:

Spend $100 per person to genotype all women in the population. Identify those with top 1% risk score. About 33% of these individuals will get breast cancer. Treat the risk outliers by giving them, e.g., regular mammograms starting a decade earlier than usual (~$100 annual mammogram x 10y = $1k). In the slide I assume the average cost of the intervention / treatment is $1k and the average benefit is $30k. All of the high risk women (1%) get the intervention, but only the 33% percent that get breast cancer (or some subset of that group) benefit from early detection. This paper estimates that early detection of breast cancer saves typically tens of thousands of dollars per individual, so my numbers are not crazy.

This is precisely what President Biden should do for his “Cancer Moonshot.”

Indeed if you dig around a bit you’ll find that breast cancer isn’t unique. Nature had a great paper titled, “Shared heritability and functional enrichment across six solid cancers.”

“Large twin studies have demonstrated an excess familial risk for cancer sites including, but not limited to, breast, colorectal, head/neck, lung, ovary, and prostate with heritability estimates ranging between 9% (head/neck) to 57% (prostate).”

We should build a cancer app that takes all the top percentiles for the polygentics for specific cancers and we should make it available for free to the general population.

Join me, President Biden. We can get it done.

****

I suspect that there’s a future in which the doorways to the Internet — Google, Amazon, and Apple — simply decide to pay for everyone to be genetically sequenced. I remember reading a few years ago that the sheer amount of cash that these companies have — billions upon billions — would make this likely. We already trust these companies with our health data and our emails. Why not our genetic data?

They may not have a choice but to expand, according to the New York Times…

…their sudden slowdown is exposing a weakness. The Big Tech companies haven’t really found a new, very profitable idea in years. Despite years of investment in new businesses, Google and Meta still rely mostly on ad sales. The iPhone, 15 years after it upended the industry, still drives Apple’s profits.

This is strange because we just passed eleven years without Steve Jobs alive at Apple.

Think of that. Jobs, despite all his billions, died of cancer. He wasn’t alone. Joe Biden’s son Beau died of cancer. Here he is detailing his cancer moonshot.

…President Biden gave a speech at the Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston, outlining the progress on his own self-described moonshot: ending cancer.

"This cancer moonshot is one of the reasons why I ran for president," Biden said. "Cancer does not discriminate red and blue. It doesn't care if you're a Republican or a Democrat. Beating cancer is something we can do together."

Biden said cancer is often diagnosed too late, and said "there are too few ways to prevent it in the first place." He also added that there are stark inequities in cancer diagnosis and treatment based on race, disability, zip code, sexual orientation and gender identity.

"We know too little about why treatments work for some patients, but a different patient with the same disease, it doesn't work for. We still lack strategies in developing treatments for some cancers," he said, adding "we don't do enough to help patients and families navigate the cancer care system."

Rep. Tom Emmer’s sister died of cancer too.

Tom Emmer @RepTomEmmer

Today would have been my sister Bridget’s 57th birthday. She passed away from cancer, and we miss her everyday. We did not have a cure in time for her, but we can save future generations from this awful disease by advancing the research and innovation necessary to find a cure.

Here’s how Emmer describe the impact of his sister’s death on his politics.

Agonizing pain overwhelmed Tom Emmer's 38-year-old sister as she lay in bed, but she was too weak to get up.

So Emmer moved her legs over the side of the bed, lifted her up and moved her around the room to keep her as comfortable as a woman dying of cancer could be.

"I literally slow-danced with my sister as she died," Minnesota's Republican governor candidate recalled about those days nearly 11 years ago.

But as sad as that time was for Emmer (he said it took six to 12 months for him to recover), the tragedy gave him a new perspective, and laid the groundwork for his campaign this year.

His sister's positive attitude convinced Emmer to become more committed and not wait to carry out his dreams, for the future is unknown.

"If the good Lord took me today, I have lived a great life," she told her brother.

Bridget's death and her advice led Emmer on a journey that transformed his attitude to one of "there is no time like the present" and he became more involved in public service.

President Biden mentions cancer often. His post vice presidential charity was about cancer. Watching him talk about how his son died of cancer has been deeply moving.

When you consider that much of Kevin McCarthy’s view of the future is to encourage domestic energy production. But if we keep going in that direction, we’re just going to get more cancer. It would be better for the future of our country is we have a Speaker who also has a vision for policy that could unite the country.