Obama creates cancer 'moonshot' task force — with Biden at the helm

WASHINGTON — President Obama established a White House Cancer Moonshot Task Force Thursday, giving a formal structure to Vice President Biden's mission to "end cancer as we know it."

The cancer "moonshot" was one of the few substantive policy proposals of Obama's last State of the Union address this month, when he announced that he would put his vice president "in charge of Mission Control." It's been a priority for Biden since his son, former Delaware Attorney General Beau Biden, died of brain cancer last May.

In a statement Thursday, Biden laid out an ambitious goal for the task force, which he hoped would continue into the next administration: "To make a decade worth of advances in five years."

"We’re not trying to make incremental change here," he said in a post on the web site Medium. "We’re trying to get to a quantum leap on the path to a cure."

The task force is "advisory only," Obama said in a presidential memorandum Thursday. Its main function will be to coordinate federal efforts, but it will also make recommendations on how to expand clinical trials, improve data, removing unnecessary regulations and explore public-private partnerships.

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The task force will have at least 14 members. In addition to the vice president, the task force will also include cabinet secretaries from Defense, Commerce, Health and Human Services, Energy and Veterans Affairs. White House officials will have four seats on the task force, and the Food and Drug Administration, National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation will also participate.

Its first meeting will be Monday, with a report due by the end of the year.

Obama has instructed the task force to engage in an "open, reciprocal dialogue with the American people," but it's unclear whether the task force's meetings will be open to the public. By establishing it as a presidential task force, other federal laws on advisory committees may not apply.