Today, the Vice President is heading to the Huntsman Cancer Institute in Salt Lake City, Utah, for a roundtable conversation with key leaders and specialists around his efforts to double the pace of progress toward a cure for cancer. You can watch that conversation below. Here's some background on the Institute, and why it's significant.
The Huntsman Cancer Institute is a a National Cancer Institute-designated Comprehensive Cancer Center.
That means it meets the highest standards for cancer care and research, and receives NCI support for its scientific research. The scientists at the Institute are focused on understanding cancer from its very beginnings to create safer and more effective treatments -- as well as better understanding the function of genes in cancer.
The Institute houses the Utah Population Database -- a rich source of in-depth information supporting research on genetics, epidemiology, demography, and public health.
This database provides access to information on more than 7.3 million individuals and supports more than 100 research projects -- and it can only be used for biomedical and health-related research. During a tour of the Institute today, the Vice President will see a demo of the database's limited query tool, which provides researchers around the world with the framework for population-based research studies.
Learn more about the Vice President's Cancer Moonshot, and share with the Vice President how cancer has touched your life.
The Vice President has been reading many of the thousands of stories that have come in from the millions of Americans around the country whose lives have been touched by cancer. He's even called a few of them. Listen to one of those conversations here.