Instead, the Bidens will set out broadly outlined goals in a showy White House ceremony to be attended by roughly 100 people, including Vice President Kamala Harris, patients, caregivers, family members, researchers and members of Congress.
The White House is billing the event as a fresh push by the president to “reignite” the moonshot program and “end cancer as we know it.” Specifically, Mr. Biden will set a goal of cutting the age-adjusted death rate — a statistic that accounts for expectations that older people are more likely to grow ill and die — by more than half over the next 25 years.
“These are audacious goals, and I have no doubt there will be mechanisms to achieve them,” said Ellen Sigal, founder of Friends of Cancer Research, which works to support cancer research and deliver new therapies to patients, who has been briefed on the plan.
Mr. Biden has already named Danielle Carnival, who worked on the moonshot program during the Obama administration, to help oversee the new version of the effort. Now, the senior officials said, the president will create a “cancer cabinet” to coordinate the work of multiple government agencies.
The White House says more than 9.5 million cancer screenings were missed in the United States as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. Mr. Biden will call on the cancer institute, a branch of the National Institutes of Health, to coordinate with cancer treatment centers to offer screenings around the country, and to develop a program to fast-track the development of tests that can detect multiple types of cancer at once.