Launched in 2016 and reestablished in 2022, the Cancer Moonshot had the goal of making a decade's worth of progress in cancer prevention, diagnosis, and treatment in five years. Funded through the 21st Century Cures Act, the Cancer Moonshot brought together patients, advocates, researchers, and clinicians dedicated to utilizing resources across the government, academia, and the private sector to end cancer as we know it.
A panel of experts was convened to make research recommendations on how to best carry out the Cancer Moonshot. Using the panel's 12 broad recommendations as a guide, NCI identified goals that would reflect this guidance and accelerate discovery, increase collaboration, and expand data sharing across the cancer community. Since then, the Cancer Moonshot has supported 250 research projects and more than 70 programs and consortia that have helped to achieve the goals NCI set out to accomplish.
Accomplishments of the Cancer Moonshot
- Established networks for direct patient engagement that would encourage people with cancer to contribute their tumor profile data and help expand knowledge about what therapies work, in whom, and in which types of cancer.
- Created an immuno-oncology translational network to develop immune-based approaches for the treatment and prevention of cancer in adult patients.
- Built a pediatric immunotherapy discovery and development network to overcome challenges in the development of immunotherapies for childhood cancers.
- Developed ways to overcome cancer's resistance to therapy through studies to identify the mechanisms that lead cancer cells to become resistant to previously effective treatments.
- Constructed a national cancer data ecosystem — the NCI Cancer Research Data Commons — to enable researchers, clinicians, and patients to contribute data and facilitate more efficient data analysis.
- Intensified research on the leading causes of childhood cancers, including improving our understanding of fusion oncoproteins, a major driver of pediatric cancer, and using new preclinical models to develop inhibitors that target them.
- Minimized cancer treatment's debilitating side effects by accelerating the development of guidelines for routine monitoring and management of patient-reported symptoms.
- Targeted the prevention and early detection of hereditary cancers by improving current methods and developing new strategies for the prevention and early detection of cancer in high-risk individuals.
- Expanded the use of proven cancer prevention and early detection strategies to reduce cancer risk in all populations.
- Conducted a retrospective analysis of patient data and biospecimens from past clinical trials to predict future patient outcomes.
- Built the Human Tumor Atlas Network to document the genetic lesions and cellular interactions of an individual tumor as it evolves from a precancerous lesion to advanced cancer.
- Developed new enabling cancer technologies to characterize tumors and test therapies.
- Created the Cancer Screening Research Network and is supporting the Vanguard Study, which will assess the feasibility of using multi-cancer detection (MCD) tests in larger trials to assess whether the benefits of using MCD tests to screen for cancer outweigh the harms, and whether they can detect cancer early in a way that reduces deaths.
- Launched the NCI Telehealth Research Centers of Excellence program, aimed at determining whether the use of telehealth can improve cancer-related care and outcomes across the cancer control continuum.