< Biden Sees 'Significant Breakthroughs' On The Horizon For Cancer Initiative

RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:

This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Rachel Martin. When Vice President Joe Biden announced last October that he would not run for president again, he said he did have one regret.

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JOE BIDEN: If I could be anything, I would've wanted to be the president that ended cancer because it's possible.

MARTIN: In his last months in the White House as vice president, he's leading the charge to make that happen. In his State of the Union address in January, President Obama tapped Biden to head up the administration's so-called cancer moonshot. It's a reference to the U.S. mission to be the first country to land on the moon.

Curing cancer may end up being an even more audacious goal because it requires bringing together a whole host of government agencies, drug companies, research institutes, other medical groups and getting them all on the same page. Vice President Biden has spent the last few months visiting cancer centers across the country. And on Thursday, we sat down with him at the Langston Hughes Community Health and Education Center in Cleveland, Ohio.

Mr. Vice President, thank you so much for sitting down with us.

BIDEN: Delighted to be with you.

MARTIN: We all know cancer is not just one disease. It's dozens, if not hundreds...

BIDEN: It's over 200.

MARTIN: ...Of different diseases, which means there's not just one cure. There are likely dozens, if not hundreds of different cures. You've tagged a billion dollars for this initiative. The annual budget for the National Cancer Institute, as you know, is $5.2 billion a year.

BIDEN: Yeah.

MARTIN: So is a billion dollars enough to do what you need to do?

BIDEN: No, it's not. And here's the deal - it's more than the money. There's an awful lot of duplication. There's very little - there's not nearly enough collaboration. There's not nearly enough joint science. And what's happened in the last five years - we've reached an inflection point. I know you're tired of hearing me use that phrase, but it's true that we now are understanding where you have genomicists working with the oncologists, working with virologists, working with chemical and biological engineers, working with immunotherapy.

And so there's multiple sources of attack. There's across-the-borders prevention. It is collaboration - we can move more quickly - as well as new research development and new breakthroughs.

MARTIN: But some would say, why not then just focus on one of those pieces? Why not put all the money into prevention?

BIDEN: Because you have to - you - it's awful hard to say to someone, you've got breast cancer, God forbid. You know, we're not going to focus on dealing with your breast cancer, even though we can. We've found genetic markers. We've found a lot of other things. Because we did, we're just going to focus on prevention. So I know you're going to die but, you know, lots of luck in your senior year. You can't do that. You've got to do it all. You've got to do it all at the same time.

MARTIN: It's a strange language one learns when dealing with cancer.

BIDEN: It is. It is.

MARTIN: Going through that with a loved one, you learn more than you ever thought you would. Have you thought about how something in this initiative could have changed things for your son? Beau Biden died almost a year ago of brain cancer.

BIDEN: A year ago on Memorial Day. The answer is I learned when I lost my wife and daughter - and a tractor-trailer broadsided them - I decided that there is no answer why - why me, or what could have happened? I find it to be a - not a useful exercise. I think he got the best - I know he got the best care he could possibly have gotten. And the particular disease he had is particularly pernicious. And not much research is being done on it - glioblastoma - in relative terms.

And so I don't sit and say, you know, if I had been somewhere else or if this had happened. But I do know this. I do know that there is the overwhelming prospect in the next year or two, three, four, five, you're going to see significant breakthroughs for certain types of cancers as well as significant breakthroughs in terms of how to turn cancer into a chronic disease as opposed to a life-threatening disease.

MARTIN: We only have a couple moments left. And we are talking in the middle of a presidential election. There's just a couple of weeks...

BIDEN: ...Is that right?

MARTIN: Yeah, I don't know if you've heard.

BIDEN: Oh (laughter).

MARTIN: Yeah, kind of a big deal. Couple weeks till the conventions. Your candidate, the presumptive Democratic nominee...

BIDEN: She is my candidate.

MARTIN: ...Hillary Clinton - there is still a cloud over her in terms of whether or not she will face an indictment for her use of a private email server during her tenure as secretary of state.

BIDEN: Under the law...

MARTIN: ...Do you think she did anything wrong?

BIDEN: Under the law - I can't comment on that for the following reason. If I comment and tell you what I think, which is positive, then the easy accusation would be Biden is vice president and probably put pressure on one of the government agencies to keep that from happening. The president and I have kept our hands off completely. What we do know is that she is incredibly - by leaps and bounds more qualified than the other person to be the president of the United States. I've known her for 40 years. I'm a friend of hers. And I don't - I find it hard to believe that she would do anything intentionally wrong.

MARTIN: She is now neck-and-neck with the GOP presumptive nominee...

BIDEN: That's true.

MARTIN: ...Donald Trump, in a recent Quinnipiac poll. A lot of Americans still don't trust her. That is the word they cite. There's a trust gap when it comes to Hillary Clinton. You're taking her home, I understand, next week.

BIDEN: I am.

MARTIN: You're taking her to Scranton, Pa. on the campaign trail.

BIDEN: Yes, yes.

MARTIN: How do you help her fix that? Do you think those perceptions of her are fair, this idea?

BIDEN: I don't think they're fair. But I acknowledge they're there, and I think - I hope that I help her just by vouching for her. I mean, most folks back home know me. And they know my shortcomings, and I have a lot of them (laughter). And they know my strengths. When you vouch for them you say, I'm putting my reputation on the line. I believe this person is a good person, has character. That's what I'm prepared to do for Hillary.

MARTIN: Why have those perceptions lingered around her?

BIDEN: Well, the truth is I don't know. I think it is in part because she has been the center of a storm for a long, long time. I don't know that anybody's ever had as much focus on them for over - many, many years. But I think it's - I think she can and will, quote, "cure" that problem. And the more people see her in a context where it's a head-to-head race and she's laying out who she is and what she does - and, you know, I think right now it's - I know it's - this is good and bad. It's awfully early in the campaign.

MARTIN: But, you know, this primary season has been a bitter one. And people always say that it sounds like a cliche, but Bernie Sanders has yet to endorse her officially, he hasn't conceded...

BIDEN: ...Well, I've talked to Bernie. Bernie's going to endorse her. This is going to work out. You can already notice in that same polling data reference is the Democrats are coalescing even before this occurs. It's...

MARTIN: ...You think she has it in her to be the great unifier? Not just of the Democratic Party, but of an American public that is more divided than ever?

BIDEN: I think she is totally equipped to be a unifier. Look, I have spent - sometimes being a unifier is - when you guys talk about me, you sometimes think I'm too much of a unifier. You think that I reach out too much to my Republican colleagues. And I think that if you look at - how can I say this? - let me give you a case in point, the refusal of the Republican Party to even hold a hearing for the Supreme Court nominee who everybody says is qualified, including them.

I called 17 of my Republican colleagues and I said, you know, you guys know this is wrong. And they go, yeah, I do know, Joe. I do know. But I can't be the first to break because Joe, all that big money is going to come in and they'll primary me here. They will do this to me and do that to me. Part of the problem is the system is a little bit broken right now. I know you talk about - and not you. I don't mean that in a specific way.

But I know you in a notarial sense talk about Hillary's, you know, negatives. But my lord, Trump is at what, 70 percent negative? Or whatever - it's a gigantic number. I mean, and people think...

MARTIN: ...The American people don't like either candidate so much.

BIDEN: But they like one a lot more than the other. And, you know, that whole expression, the proof of the pudding is in the eating - I think as this campaign goes forward, it's going to become clearer and clearer to people as they focus and they don't just listen to the negative advertisement. At least, that's my hope.

MARTIN: If you will permit me one more question.

BIDEN: Sure.

MARTIN: I got the one-minute wrap. But a moon landing is something very different than fixing and solving cancer.

BIDEN: In a sense, it's almost...

MARTIN: ...There was a flag. There was a moment America was watching on TV. That moonshot was easy to measure. How do you measure this?

BIDEN: Well, there will be a flag when, for example, we find out that there are no more stovepipes, where you have all these private organizations aggregating data of genomic sequencing and biopsies and lifestyles in one place instead of each of them having their own little thing.

MARTIN: These will be incremental victories for you personally.

BIDEN: Yeah - but no, I think they'll be more than incremental. I think you can begin to see as a consequence of these institutional changes that I expect to take place - I think you'll see breakthroughs occurring really much more rapidly. I think you're going to see over the next three, four years a number of vaccines developed that actually prevent cancer from occurring.

You're already seeing things that I think you're going to see - I'm not a scientist, but what I've tried to learn as much as I can - I think you're going to see the ability to take a blood test and determine whether you have a marker for cancer and prevent it from happening. And I think you're going to see a whole range of changes that take place in the treatment of cancers.

There's just so many things that are sitting there on the cusp that I really believe in the next two to five years you're going to see significant changes where people say you know, if I'd gotten that cancer five years ago I'd be dead. Now I'm alive and I'm going to be able to make it. I really think you're going to see that.

MARTIN: Vice President Joe Biden, thank you so much for your time.

BIDEN: Thank you. I appreciate it.

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