Vice President Joe Biden (Photo: Shutterstock).
Vice President Joe Biden (Photo: Shutterstock).

Less than a year since Vice President Joe Biden buried his son, who died from brain cancer, Biden is expected to continue talking up the White House’s cancer-fighting task force when he visits Seattle next week.

Biden is expected to appear at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, according to a report in the Seattle Times and a GeekWire source with knowledge of the visit. Biden has only announced that he’ll be in Seattle on March 21 to campaign for the re-election of US Sen. Patty Murray.

President Barack Obama announced the “cancer moonshot task force” during the State of the Union address in January. The task force is charged with ending cancer as we know it. Beau Biden, 46, was laid to rest in June and since then the Obama administration has focused on attacking cancer with the same sort of determined effort that helped the United States reach the moon.

According to the Times, this will be Biden’s fifth roundtable talk since he began to spearhead the task force.

Even the VP has acknowledged that ridding the world of cancer is a far more difficult challenge than landing a man on the moon. Critics have pointed out that it certainly will cost more than the $1 billion the administration has budgeted.

Known as the Fred Hutch, the non-profit research center is one of the most respected in the world, tackling cancer research as well diseases such as HIV/AIDS. A number of high-profile companies have spun out of the Hutch in recent years, most notably Juno Therapeutics which went public a year after it was founded. The cancer research organization is now led by  Dr. Gary Gilliland, an expert in cancer genetics and former vice president of precision medicine at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine.

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