Trump’s Fight Against Cancer Puts Patients First – Inside Sources

For decades, our country’s cancer strategy focused primarily on treating the disease after it appeared. While groundbreaking therapies help save lives, too many families still receive a diagnosis when it’s already too late. How can we change that?

President Trump is helping revolutionize how we, as a nation, fight cancer. He has championed a comprehensive approach to the war against cancer, one that prioritizes prevention, accelerates innovation, expands patient access and embraces breakthrough technologies that can save lives through earlier detection.

His first administration established a strong foundation. The Right to Try Act empowered patients with life-threatening cancers and other illnesses to pursue innovative treatments when other options had run out.

For patients battling terminal illnesses with no remaining treatment options, the Right to Try Act provided a pathway to access promising novel therapies. The president removed barriers between desperate patients and potential treatments, empowering patients and their doctors to make decisions about their own care.

It’s called hope through personal choice.

Today, the administration is building on those successes while advancing a broader vision through the Make America Healthy Again movement. The administration recognizes a critical truth the medical establishment has ignored: truly defeating cancer requires a more proactive approach.

Through the MAHA Commission, the administration has focused attention on lifestyle factors that are associated with increased cancer risk, such as poor diet, excessive alcohol consumption and physical inactivity.

Addressing these factors head-on is good public health policy and common sense.

Americans should have access to the information and tools they need to make healthier choices and reduce their risk of disease before treatment becomes necessary. Government bureaucrats shouldn’t be in the way.

Lifestyle prevention alone is not enough. Cancer strikes even healthy Americans. That is why one of the most promising aspects of the cancer agenda has been its support for earlier detection.

For many of the deadliest cancers, such as pancreatic, ovarian and liver, traditional screening options are nonexistent. Patients frequently receive a diagnosis only after symptoms emerge and the disease has spread. By then, treatment options may be limited.

That is why support for innovative screening technologies could be transformative.

Multi-cancer early detection testing can identify cancer signals in the bloodstream before symptoms appear, helping physicians detect a wide range of cancers from a blood draw. The Food and Drug Administration is evaluating one such test, Galleri, and an FDA advisory committee recently voted for its approval.

Currently, 70 percent of cancer deaths come from cancers without routine screenings. Let that sink in. When cancer is caught in the earliest stages, before it has spread, the five-year relative survival is 92 percent.

However, once the cancer has distantly spread throughout the body, that five-year survival rate drops to 35 percent. Every adult in America should know this.

For patients facing cancers that are notoriously difficult to detect before they make their presence known, wider access to these types of technologies could represent one of the most significant advances in cancer detection in decades, giving them the chance to treat the disease, not simply manage it.

Thanks to legislation Trump signed earlier this year, Galleri’s FDA approval could pave the way for Medicare recipients to access the latest in cancer screening technology. This could be the game changer we’ve all been hoping for.

The administration has demonstrated a commitment to ensuring a regulatory framework that encourages innovation, upholds gold-standard science, and prioritizes patient access. It has done so by advancing policies that enable the rapid deployment of medical technology, allowing the latest advancements to benefit patients rather than gather dust on a shelf.

Once that cancer is detected and diagnosed, the president is making it easier for promising new treatments to come to market. The FDA’s National Priority Voucher Program, launched last year, helps new medicines made in America receive expedited regulatory approval. Thanks to the program, the first targeted therapy for metastatic pancreatic cancer was approved months ahead of schedule. This new treatment can help patients facing one of the deadliest cancers. You know how difficult that cancer is to treat.

The fight against cancer requires a relentless focus on prevention, early detection, scientific innovation and patient access. By empowering patients, embracing medical innovation, and accelerating promising tests and treatments, the Trump administration is helping cancer patients, and it has a real opportunity to dramatically change the course of cancer by continuing to implement these policies with urgency.