Ariel Wittenberg, E&E News: May 4, 2021
President Biden pledged last week to “end cancer as we know it,” a bold promise focused on boosting funding to the National Institutes of Health for a special Advanced Research Projects Agency-Health.
ARPA-H would be similar to the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, or ARPA-E, acting as a technology incubator by funding high-potential, high-impact projects that are too early for private-sector investment, but with the “singular purpose to develop breakthroughs to prevent, detect and treat” diseases.
“I can think of no more worthy investment. I know of nothing that is more bipartisan,” Biden told Congress last week. “So let’s end cancer as we know it. It’s within our power. It’s within our power to do it.”
But public health experts who have spent their careers examining environmental causes of cancer say it may not be possible to truly stop cancer without EPA stepping in.
The agency has been infamously slow to stop the use of known carcinogens for decades. Those include benzene, arsenic and asbestos, which is responsible for 40,000 deaths per year alone.
“We know that several chemicals are known to cause cancer in humans and others are highly suspect,” said Bob Sussman, an attorney and former EPA official now representing multiple groups in asbestos litigation against the agency. “There are many causes of cancer, but if we don’t address chemicals, we won’t get the job done.”
EPA could help Biden on his mission if it were faster to regulate not just asbestos but also PFOA, phthalates and bisphenol A, said Linda Birnbaum, who formerly led the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.
Listening to Biden’s address to Congress, she said, she was happy to hear the president “talking about major changes in how society functions.”
“But the focus was on treatment and cures,” she said. “I’m not opposed to treatment and cures, but I think it’s better to prevent if you can.”
Diana Zuckerman, president of the National Center for Health Research, agreed that the nation needs a “two-pronged attack” to end cancer.
“You can’t talk about even reducing cancer without talking about environmental toxins,” she said.
She noted that while Biden did mention a need to research cancer “prevention” during his speech, the medical community often refers to cancer screenings as prevention.
“Screening isn’t prevention; it’s early detection. You’ve already got the cancer; we just found it early,” she said. “If you want to prevent it, you have to deal with what causes it in the environment.”
Asked whether EPA sees a role in Biden’s quest to “end cancer as we know it,” the agency responded only, “EPA is fully on board with President Biden’s agenda.”
It’s not exactly clear what that means. Biden did not mention a role for the agency during the cancer portion of his speech to Congress. But the president’s quest to end cancer is famously motivated by his late son, Beau Biden, who died of glioblastoma in 2015.
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Margaret Kripke, a professor of immunology at the University of Texas’ MD Anderson Cancer Center who has been studying the environmental causes of cancer for years, served on the President’s Cancer Panel in the early 2000s. The culmination of her work on the panel was a report on environmental causes of cancer that said “the true burden of environmentally-induced cancer has been grossly underestimated.”
The paper also took aim at EPA, complaining that “ubiquitous chemicals,” like bisphenol A, were still found in many consumer goods despite growing evidence of links to cancer.
“Not a whole lot has changed since then,” Kripke told E&E News last week, “except that we do know more about cancer and how it works, and how chemical exposures work.”
Unfortunately, she and Birnbaum concur, not everyone agrees about what type of evidence is needed to prove a given chemical causes cancer.
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Kripke said EPA might be empowered to regulate more carcinogens if there were more research, either in the lab or in epidemiological studies.
“I do think it’s on the regulatory agencies, because there are a lot of things that are clearly carcinogenic that are regulated in other countries that are not regulated here,” she said. “But at the end of the day, the agencies can only act on the basis of information, and that information ultimately comes from the research efforts.”
That’s where she hopes Biden’s new mission can help. She said cancer funding is often determined by panels of researchers, who themselves can be biased toward funding research similar to their own. If the purpose of an ARPA-H organization is to fund research that would have difficulty obtaining funding otherwise, she said, studies on the health impacts of chemicals could fit that bill.
“If they are going to have a little broader thinking about what is appropriate for funding than traditional panels made up of people doing current cancer research, then maybe there might be a better opportunity to propose studies on cancer-causing agents or chemicals,” she said.
The Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to a request for comment on whether, if approved by Congress, a new ARPA-H would emphasize environmental causes of cancer.
But Zuckerman said she is skeptical that an ARPA-H would mean more funding for research on environmental carcinogens. While ARPA-E, at the Department of Energy, does fund applied and demonstration research for new technologies — the kinds of work private companies don’t find economical — Zuckerman noted that the research is often then picked up and used by companies looking to make money.
“You may get a huge infusion of cash, and yay for that, but it is still within a system where, at the end, there are people who want to earn money off this research,” she said. “You can earn a lot more money off a cancer treatment than you can off reducing pollution.”
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