CancerX looks to digital to solve cancer care access challenges

CancerX, a new initiative under President Joe Biden’s Cancer Moonshot, looks to bring diverse stakeholders together to leverage digital technology to tackle the biggest challenges in cancer – starting with health inequity and financial toxicity. We spoke with the ringleaders of this exciting new effort.

Last year in Boston, at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, President Joe Biden gave a speech about his own administration’s moonshot – the re-ignited Cancer Moonshot, first initiated in 2016, but given new life by the Biden administration in 2022.

Biden, who lost a son to cancer, has said that this effort is one of the reasons he ran for presidency.

“The goal is to cut cancer death rates by at least 50% – at least 50% – in the next 25 years; to turn more cancers from death sentences into chronic diseases people can live with; to create a more supportive experience for our patients and families; and to update our fight against cancer,” Biden said at that event last year.

“It’s a disease we often diagnose too late and have too few ways to prevent it in the first place; where there are stark inequities based on race, disability, ZIP Code, sexual orientation, gender identity, and other factors,” he went on. “We don’t do enough to help patients and families navigate the cancer care system. We don’t learn enough from their experience as patients. We don’t share enough data and knowledge to bring the urgency we need to finding new answers. But for each – for each of the ways we know cancer today, we know we can change the trajectory.”

• Read the full article in pharmaphorum's Deep Dive digital magazine