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Biden Names Leader for "Moonshot" Cancer Campaign

5/04/2016, Gardiner Harris, The New York Times

WASHINGTON — Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. will announce on Friday a corporate executive to lead his “moonshot” cancer initiative, selecting an expert who began work in 2003 to lower barriers between science and cures.

Greg Simon, 64, who will be named executive director, took a job he may get to keep for only the last 10 months of the Obama administration. Mr. Simon, who is battling cancer himself, said he understood the urgency of the task.

“There are so many things in the cure process that take too long,” he said.

In June 2014, Mr. Simon received a diagnosis of chronic lymphocytic leukemia, a blood and bone marrow disease, and six months ago completed his first round of chemotherapy. He is now healthy, but while fighting the illness one of his close friends died, leaving two young children.

“The vice president has a chance to change the culture of science,” Mr. Simon said. “And if we can create new approaches that are a step away from the road scientists have long been traveling, in a year or two it will be a different road.”

Mr. Simon was an aide to Vice President Al Gore from 1991 to 1997, eventually leaving as his top domestic policy adviser to set up a lobbying and advisory firm. In 2003, he was lured by Michael R. Milken to start FasterCures, a charity intended to speed the translation between basic research and lifesaving medicines. In 2009, Mr. Simon left FasterCures to become senior vice president for patient engagement at Pfizer. He left Pfizer in 2012, and has been working since then as the chief executive of Poliwogg, a financial services company focused on investing in life sciences.

“With his amazing breadth of experience, both in the public and private sector, he will bring an invaluable knowledge of the health care landscape to the task force,” Mr. Biden said in a statement.

At FasterCures, Mr. Simon was a prominent voice for the potentially transformative effects of sequencing the human genome.

“In the lifetime of my generation, most of the diseases we are dealing with, if not cured, should be turned into treatable chronic diseases,” Mr. Simon said in 2007, speaking of a notion that was widely held at the time but that most researchers now believe was wildly optimistic. But even then, Mr. Simon said that to achieve such breakthroughs, “we have to have a new system.”

Mr. Simon has been critical of the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health, organizations where, he once said, “curing disease is a byproduct of the system and not a goal.” He will now have to work closely with both agencies, which have representatives on the task force. Mr. Biden, whose son Beau died from cancer last year, is the chairman of the initiative, which hopes to promote a decade’s worth of advances in cancer research in five years. But with just $195 million in new funding, the task force is considered an exceedingly modest effort.

Mary Wooley, the president of ResearchAmerica, an advocacy group, said Mr. Simon had an unusual ability to bring together diverse groups of people to focus on a problem.

“Maybe with persistence, we can overcome the legacy systems and thinking that slow things down,” Ms. Wooley said.

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