Cancer Moonshot 2020
| Cancer Breakthroughs 2020 | |
|---|---|
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| Mission statement | To accelerate the potential of combination immunotherapies as the next generation standard of care in patients with cancer |
| Products | Cancer treatments immunotherapy |
| Founder | Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong |
| Key people | Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong |
| Funding | Private & Public |
| Status | Active |
| Website | www |
Cancer Breakthroughs 2020, formerly Cancer Moonshot 2020, is a coalition announced in January 2016 in the United States with the goal of finding vaccine-based immunotherapies against cancer. By pooling the resources of multinational pharmaceutical, biotechnology companies, academic centers and oncologists, it intends to create access to over 60 novels and approved agents under exploration in the war against cancer and is expected to enable rapid testing of novel immunotherapy combination protocols. The initiative is being managed by a consortium of companies called The National Immunotherapy Coalition (NIC). The NIC plans to design, initiate and complete randomized clinical trials in cancer patients with cancer at all stages of disease in up to 20 tumor types in as many as 20,000 patients by the year 2020. The project's stated goal is to aggressively focus on rapidly developing new treatments for the disease. The organization attempts to rethink how cancer is tackled, using the body's own immune system and re-training it to detect and destroy the body's cancer cells.
The difficulty of treating cancer has led researchers to develop more and more targeted drugs and immune therapies, with the future goal of hitting "cancers with several such treatments at once, much the way AIDS was tamed when researchers developed drugs to strike the virus at its vulnerable points." This new form of combination therapy is needed as cancer is heterogeneous and multiple methods are needed to target multiple types of cancer.
Some cancer specialists have expressed optimism that science has entered a "new era with the ability to rapidly determine the sequences of genes in tumor cells, searching for mutations that may be driving the cancer’s growth." Others call it "unrealistic."
Cancer Breakthroughs 2020 is pursuing immunotherapy and the following themes:
The leader of the initiative was reported to be Los Angeles billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, and participating members include pharmaceutical companies Amgen and Celgene, biotech companies including NantWorks, NantKwest, Etubics, Altor BioScience, and Precision Biologics, a subsidiary of NantWorks, major academic cancer centers, community oncologists, health insurer Independence Blue Cross, and Bank of America, reportedly one of the largest self-insured companies in the U.S.
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