Moonshot 2020

I am so excited to have been asked to write this post about the Cancer Moonshot 2020, to help spread awareness for what is happening with this exciting program. The Cancer Moonshot represents an enormous opportunity for rare cancers to get increase attention and become more treatable. Because of this, The Mesothelioma + Asbestos Awareness Center is working to get others involved by spreading awareness and talking about the topic. The MAAC is an organization that works to help those with mesothelioma, a rare cancer caused by asbestos. To learn more about this cancer head over to their page!

First, let me explain to you how I understand it because in all honesty, at first I didn’t understand it at all.

Moonshot 2020 is a colabration between many valuable resources, i.e. government, pharmaceutical companies, researcher, and doctors. Instead of each one working as an individual, they will work as one team.

I do best explaining things in analogies, so I am going to use football here. And no I am not a huge football fan, but it seems to work here! With the Moonshot 2020 in place any and everyone involved with the fight against cancer are going to come together and work as a football team. The outcome to win against cancer.

How will this work? In my mind I see it as a football game where every single person who works for the team is needed. Either to be on the football team, coach the team, coach special aspects, the fans to cheer, all the employees to run to stadium and so much more. 

The scientists, researchers and others will be the quarterback stepping back to look at the whole field to find an open pocket to call the play. They will decide if they can run the ball themselves or need to throw it, or a combination of both. After however many attempts at getting a first down, they will them decide as a team what needs to be done with the ball. It could be kick a field goal to increase the score or bring on the defensive team, who is still working with the same team just from a different angle.  This could be the immunotherapies or any other number of ideas already being researched on to stop the other team from scoring. The simplest way to explain this is a football team can’t win the Super Bowl if they only have a great quarterback.

Now back to Moonshot 2020.  How does my description above about football tie into cancer? All the separate moving parts will come together as a moving, winning football team. They will share notes, findings of what worked and didn’t work in specific tests in their lab, so other labs aren’t repeating the same studies over and over again. With them sharing information, if one company gets stuck with their progress, another lab can look at test notes and see a crack the others might have missed. One company can piggyback on another’s findings and keep the ball rolling.

With this, new eyes will be looking at the same findings in hopes of seeing overlaying information that can be tweaked here and there to ultimately find a cure!

This is going to take a ton of work from all parties already involved, getting new parties on board and more, but if we were able to put a man on the moon, we will be able to find a cure for cancer.