Joe Biden has a new cause: Cancer

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LAST May, US Vice President Joe Biden’s son Beau died of brain cancer. But in the last days of his son’s life, Mr. Biden came in touch with a doctor who would alter the course of his own life and career. Mr. Biden and his family had been contacting doctors and scientists worldwide in the hopes of finding something that could save Beau, to no avail. But one of the last doctors they reached before Beau’s death, Dr. Patrick SoonShiong, flew to Washington from California to meet with the Biden family. Although he was unable to save Beau’s life, Dr. SoonShiong’s meeting with the Vice President resulted in developing as relationship which is focusing the next stage of Mr. Biden’s public life. Having concluded that he did not have enough time to mount a campaign to defeat Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination, Mr. Biden gave up the idea of running for president again, and joined Dr. Soon-Shiong in the fight to conquer cancer.

After their first meeting at the White House, Dr. Soon-Shiong gave the Vice President a two-page outline of his plan. “We need to find a completely different way to change cancer care in this country,” Dr. Soon-Shiong said. “Vice President Biden could play an amazing role in making this happen.”

Mr. Biden turns 73 this November and faces involuntary retirement in January, 2017, after 44 years as a senator and vice president. He is in good health and looking for a new project.

The two-page paper that Dr. Soon-Shiong gave Mr. Biden advocates an expanded use of denome-sequencing to understand individual cancers better and tailor treatment to the individual patient. It suggests the creation of patient-specific cancer vaccines that harness the individual’s own natural “killer cells” to treat and prevent the recurrence of cancer.

With Mr. Biden’s help, Dr. Soon-Shiong says, “I’ve never been more hopeful in my life about our chance of changing the course of this disease. Mr. Biden can make this happen. Here’s a man who enveloped himself during his son’s illness and got to understand the intracies of his disease, and he is a person who can cross the aisle and work with both Republicans and Democrats.”

Dr. Soon-Shiong’s paper proposes performing full genomic sequencing on 100,000 cancer patients in the next 400 days to create a vast database for supercomputer analysis. “It is a perfect moment for the administration to deliver in this last mile, cementing this health care transformation into the fabric of (national) health care.”

“If it works, this whole world could change.”