Vice President Joe Biden threatened Wednesday to pull federal funding for cancer studies that fail to publicly disclose their results, putting pressure on researchers, clinicians and drug companies to speed up progress toward cancer cures.
Hosting a cancer summit in Washington, Biden said the culture in the cancer research world is stifling progress, and he was “committed to doing everything in my power'' to change that culture. He cited concerns that prominent medical institutions that receive millions in taxpayer dollars are flouting a federal rule that says they must submit their results to a publicly accessible database within a year.
“Doc, I'm going to find out if it's true, and if it's true, I'm going to cut funding,'' Biden said. “That's a promise.'' For months, Biden has been imploring cancer researchers to share their data and trial results more freely, so that scientists can build on each other's progress and more readily identify treatments that might work for individual patients. His ultimatum at the summit was the first time Biden has suggested that failure to heed that call could lead to National Institutes of Health grants being terminated.
There's no mechanism in place to enforce the mandate that trial results be quickly posted to www.clinicaltrials.gov, where patients and their doctors can identify treatments that have been effective for other patients. The Obama administration is developing a rule to crack down on those who ignore the requirement, the White House said.
At the summit, the showpiece of Biden's yearlong “moonshot,'' the vice president said the world was “on the cusp of breakthroughs.'' Yet he suggested the cancer community was essentially standing in its own way. He called out drug companies for unnecessary price increases and major research hospitals for insufficient collaboration.“It's not anybody's fault, but we've got to fix it,'' Biden said
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