On March 13, 2017, former US Vice President Joseph Biden opened the Biden Institute at his alma mater, the University of Delaware. This new research and policy institution will deal with domestic issues including economic reform, environmental sustainability, criminal justice, and civil rights. Biden will be the founding chair of the institute, which will be part of the university’s School of Public Policy and Administration.
Biden will be splitting his time between the University of Delaware and the University of Pennsylvania, where he will head a foreign policy institute called the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement. The foreign policy institute will be located in Washington, D.C., but Biden also will have an office on the Penn campus in Philadelphia.
Pictured is Biden speaking at the festival South by Southwest (SXSW) in Austin, where he spoke about his work in the framework of the Biden Cancer Initiative. This initiative is known as the Cancer Moonshot and aims to accelerate cancer research which enables developing new therapies for cancer. At this event, he admitted that Obama talked to him one day about whether Biden would run for president, to which he replied: “I would have loved to have been the president who presided over the end of cancer.”
Let us recall that Washington’s Howard University held a cancer summit on June 29, 2016, where US vice president Biden announced plans as part of the administration’s Cancer Moonshot initiative, aimed at speeding development of treatments by cutting bureaucracy and easing collaboration between scientists, industry, patients, and government. The summit was attended by hundreds of researchers, patient advocates, and data experts. At the summit, Biden made an impassioned plea for increased urgency in the fight against cancer. In addition, he announced the formation of an Oncology Center of Excellence at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which would coordinate and review all of FDA cancer treatments.
