Joe Biden, for whom this topic has a painful personal dimension, will present his policy against cancer on Monday, exactly 60 years after John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s historic speech about conquering the moon, writes AFP.

The American president will dedicate a keynote address at 20:00 GMT in Boston to his “Cancer Moonshot” initiative.

He wants to reduce cancer deaths by 50% in 25 years.

Joe Biden, who has pledged to end cancer “as we know it,” is expected to introduce several aspects of the initiative.

His efforts are focused both on the sometimes exorbitant cost of treatment and on the detection of cancer through blood tests.

The White House said it has capped at $2,000 a year the amount that many American citizens who use Medicare, America’s health insurance system for people over 65, can get.

However, she notes that today, some patients have to pay more than $8,000 a year for prostate cancer treatment.

Blood screening

Another big project of the US government is the film adaptation.

The United States has launched a large-scale trial – initially involving 24,000 people, with the goal of expanding to 225,000 – to identify tests that can detect one or more types of cancer with just a blood test.

Joe Biden also signed a decree on the development of the biotechnology sector.

The president also appointed Rene Veghin, the first director of the agency created last spring to oversee the development of advanced medical research, the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health Care (ARPA-H).

The highlight of the day will be a performance at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston.

The speech will come exactly sixty years after John F. Kennedy’s famous speech on September 12, 1962, when he said, “We resolve to go to the moon,” setting a goal of sending men to the moon by the end of the decade.

The goal was achieved because on July 21, 1969, Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon.

The fight against cancer is a political goal, but also an intimate struggle for the US president, whose eldest son Beau Biden died of brain cancer in 2015 at the age of 46.