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Biden Visits Canary Center of Excellence on Cancer Listening Tour

April 6, 2016

The vice president’s Cancer Moonshot initiative met with researchers at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center to talk about cures for cancer.

Monday, March 21, 2016. Vice President Joe Biden talking with Dr. Joshua Veatch during his walking tour of Stan Riddell’s lab at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. Senator Patty Murray is to the right and Dr. Phil Greenberg is in the rear.

Vice President Joe Biden talks with Dr. Joshua Veatch during a walking tour at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, a Canary Center of Excellence. (Photo courtesy of the Seattle Times)

Back in January at the president’s State of the Union address, there was one announcement that stuck out for many of us. President Obama announced he was putting Vice President Joe Biden in charge of what is now called the Cancer Moonshot Task Force. It got its name because its mission – to eliminate cancer as we know it – is about as ambitious as putting a man on the moon used to be.

A significant early development occurred last month when Biden visited the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center (the ‘Hutch’) in Seattle, one of the Canary Foundation’s Centers for Excellence, as part of a listening tour. Biden’s visit to the Hutch included a panel discussion with area researchers, care providers, policymakers and patients, as well as Fred Hutch President and Director Dr. Gary Gilliland.

The Canary Foundation’s ties to the Hutch extend back to 2001 when Canary Founder Don Listwin discovered the work of epidemiologist Dr. Nicole Urban and a new field called biomarkers. He ended up funding some of her work and then later met Nobel Laureate Dr. Lee Hartwell, director of the center. Don’s investment helped establish the core of a biomarker discovery and analysis program at the HUTCH, and it remains one of Canary’s ‘Centers of Excellence’.

Today, the Canary Research Teams at the Hutch collaborate closely with faculty at the Canary Center for Early Cancer Detection at Stanford University to achieve the same goal: saving lives by developing reliable methods for early cancer detection.

Learn more about the Canary Foundation’s research centers, and check out this video about Biden’s visit to the Hutch below. (Video by Bo Jungmayer & Robert Hood / Fred Hutch News Service)