Ahluwalia on the Future of the Cancer Moonshot Program

Since its launch in 2016, the White House's Cancer Moonshot initiative has aimed to facilitate, optimize, and advance research and collaboration in the field of cancer diagnosis and treatment.

In an interview with Targeted Oncology^TM, Manmeet Ahluwalia, MD, MBA, FASCO, chief scientific office, chief of medical oncology, deputy director, and Fernandez Family endowed chair in cancer research at the Baptist Health Miami Cancer Institute, discusses what the Cancer Moonshot program can do in the coming years to improve cancer detection and patient care.

Transcription:

0:09 | So I'm very excited to see this bold initiative under the auspices of Cancer Moonshot. I think it's the right thing to do. We are in the best era of advancement and innovation in the history of humankind, and so we need to build on cancer screenings. I would like to give you an example. In the multi-cancer detection research, which is a [National Cancer Institute (NCI)] project now looking [at] a blood test to screen cancers early but also to screen them with a high specificity and sensitivity. That means if someone has cancer, we identify it. But also, if we identify something, it's not a false positive, because otherwise that gives a lot of anxiety for our patients. So there is a launch in 2024 of a vanguard effort from NCI which is going to look at 24,000 patients to look at early detection of cancer. And if that program shows promise, there's an effort to increase it to over 200,000 patients.

1:08 | I think this will forever move the needle in terms of finding cancers early and then hopefully curing them. I'm very excited about the initiatives in terms of equity, decreasing disparities. We do know that patients of minority origin do not participate in enough numbers on clinical trials that get drugs FDA approval. So we do not know when a drug gets FDA approval what kind of a benefit will it have for a [Black] patient or a Hispanic patient. We are also excited about improving quality of life or quality of care that we are providing to our patients every day with cutting-edge research but also efforts to mitigate the [adverse] effects of therapies and then also ensuring that we have a good quality of life for our cancer survivors, because due to all the advancements we've made in last several decades, the great thing is that we have more patients surviving post-cancer, but we need to do a better job to enhance ensure that we have a good quality of life for those patients.