The Moonshot to Cure Cancer

These are the two things Vice President Biden plans to do:

1.) Increase resources — both private and public — to fight cancer.

2.) Break down silos and bring all the cancer fighters together — to work together, share information, and end cancer as we know it.

I think that's great. We definitely need more collaboration and cooperation, but I'm wondering how that will be organized. How can we get a comprehensive research strategy? Maybe that's what's about to happen. Right now how research is done seems pretty haphazard . There's too much money spent in some areas (for example there are about a dozen clinical trials being done right now on methylnaltrexone for opioid induced constipation---seems like overkill), and not enough on others (like using curcumin nanoparticles to target breast cancer stem cells). Does any governmental or academic body track all the research right now to see what looks promising, and try to direct researchers into areas where there are gaps? And it would be helpful to know why some trials get abandoned. It's often hard to tell the reason. We need to know negative results, too. A lot of times those aren't even published. I think the NCI, or ASCO or perhaps various cancer symposium working groups should take a methodical look at what has already been done to better guide where we are going. It may be that some very promising things have been abandoned unnecessarily, and we might achieve success faster if research resources were deployed with a big picture in mind.