Cancer Moonshot
Cancer Breakthroughs 2020 is a coalition 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 novel 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. 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.
