Vice President Biden to host Cancer Moonshot Summit in Washington, D.C.

What
Vice President Biden and Dr. Jill Biden will host a Cancer Moonshot Summit in Washington, D.C. at the White House. Cheryl Willman, MD, Director and CEO of The University of New Mexico Comprehensive Cancer Center, will attend.

At the same time, the UNM Comprehensive Cancer Center will host a local Cancer Moonshot Summit. Local summits will take place in 99 other locations throughout the United States. Vice President Biden will address the summits in a video.

Why
The Cancer Moonshot Summit will bring together leaders from sectors that have a role to play in making progress on the Cancer Moonshot goals, to share new ideas and to launch new collaborations.

President Barack Obama launched the initiative on Jan. 12 during his State of the Union Address. Vice President Joe Biden is leading the initiative. The vice president is working with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Cancer Institute (NCI) to increase research funding and accelerate cancer discoveries.

The Vice President lost his son, Beau, to brain cancer in 2015. His wife, Second Lady Jill Biden, PhD, started the Biden Breast Health Initiative in Delaware in 1993 after four of her friends were diagnosed with breast cancer.

The UNM Cancer Center is the only NCI-designated cancer center within a 500-mile radius. It serves the entire state of New Mexico, which has a unique and rural population. The UNM Cancer Center has made several breakthroughs in cancer research, including breakthroughs in nanotechnology, cancer care delivery, and using genomics to personalize medicine.

At the Cancer Moonshot Summit in Washington, DC, Willman will share research ideas and collaboration opportunities with others throughout the country.

The local summit will feature a panel of cancer scientists who will talk about cancer research in New Mexico; bringing the newest, most advanced treatments to our state; and how the Cancer Moonshot initiative will help New Mexicans with cancer.

Who
Cheryl L. Willman, MD, has served as director and CEO of the UNM Cancer Center since 1999. She is a distinguished professor of pathology and internal medicine at the UNM School of Medicine, where she holds the Maurice and Marguerite Liberman Distinguished Chair in Cancer Research. She is an internationally recognized leukemia researcher, whose work now focuses on the use of comprehensive genomic technologies to identify novel targets for improved diagnosis, risk classification and therapy, and the translation of these new targets to diagnostics, therapeutics and clinical trials.

Where and When
The Cancer Moonshoot Summit will take place Wednesday, June 29, 2016
The White House, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C.

The local summit will take place Wednesday, June 29, 2016, 11:00 A.M. to 1:00 P.M.
The University of New Mexico Comprehensive Cancer Center
1201 Camino de Salud, NE, Albuquerque, NM 87102

Source: University of New Mexico Comprehensive Cancer Center