The White House revealed Monday that President Obama plans to spend $1 billion over the next two years on his "moonshot" goal of curing cancer.
Most of the money, which will "jumpstart" ongoing research, will go toward developing vaccines, improving early detection techniques, researching immunotherapy treatments and analyzing the genetic composition of tumors, according to USA Today.
The National Institutes of Health will receive the majority of the funding, but the plan allocates some for the Food and Drug Administration, Department of Defense and Department of Veterans Affairs.
Obama announced his ambitious goal to beat cancer during his 2016 State of the Union address, saying he would tap Vice President Joe Biden, whose son recently died of cancer, to lead the Cancer Moonshot Task Force.
The National Institutes of Health is expected to spend $195 million on cancer research this year, money that was approved by Congress in its budget deal late last year. Obama will ask lawmakers to approve an additional $755 million in his 2017 budget proposal, set to be released on Feb. 9, according to The Associated Press. The president also wants to give Biden control over a special fund for "high-risk, high-return research."
White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said that the effort is unlikely to yield any immediate breakthroughs.
"That's why I think the 'moonshot' analogy that the president has drawn here is appropriate. It was President Kennedy who laid out this goal, but the goal was not realized in the Kennedy presidency," Earnest said. "What he did was he set an ambitious vision and began to orient the federal government in the direction of accomplishing this goal, and the results were realized a number of years later, but sooner than anybody thought. And we're hoping for a similar outcome when it comes to fighting cancer."
On Monday, the president and vice president, together with various health and scientific agencies and the Pentagon, held the inaugural closed-door meeting for the cancer task force. Biden told the assembled officials that the task force will "take a whole-of-government approach" and conduct 10 years worth of research in five years, according to Engadget. In an email to supporters on Monday, Biden said he hopes the task force can "clear out the bureaucratic hurdles - and let science happen."
