With JFK’s daughter, Joe Biden introduces the “supercharged Cancer Moonshot.”

Biden, who wants to cut cancer deaths in half over the next 25 years, said cancer can be transformed into a disease that can be managed and lived with.

He issued his new call to arms at the John F. Kennedy Library, on the anniversary of Prsident Kennedy’s famous ‘Moonshot’ speech.

‘On the 60th anniversary of his clarion call, we face another inflection point, and together, we can choose to move forward with unity, hope and optimism,’ Biden said.

He called on Americans to muster the ‘energies and skills’ to ‘end cancer as we know it. And even cure cancers once and for all.’

‘This cancer moonshot is one of the reasons why I ran for president,’ he said.

Biden noted cancer doesn’t discriminate. ‘It doesn’t care if you’re Republican or a Democrat.’

Biden was in Boston to deliberately set to echo John F. Kennedy’s famous 1962 ‘Moonshot speech’ in which JFK called for landing an American on the lunar surface — something achieved in 1969.

Biden had Kennedy’s daughter, who serves as his ambassador to Australia, at his side. He called her and her son Jack back to the stage after his remarks so they could all work the rope line together.

Caroline Kennedy praised Biden repeatedly in her opening remarks.

‘He’s living President Kennedy’s call to service throughout his life and career. As president, he has restored the soul of America advanced freedom and democracy around the world. For more than 50 years, President Biden has been fighting for working families, affordable health care access to a quality education, and always to honor our men and women in uniform,’ she said.

The president also issued an executive order boosting the US biotech sector as part of the initiative, which invokes the national effort to land a man on the Moon.

This time, Biden is pushing for government-backed efforts to coordinate and fund a multilayered fight against cancer, with the goal of halving cancer death rates in the next 25 years.

As he set off from Washington, Biden issued an order meant to bolster the trailblazing US biotech sector’s efforts to take on growing commercial rivals in China.

The order brings federal support for ‘areas that will define US biotechnology leadership and our economic competitiveness in the coming decades,’ a senior Biden administration official told reporters.

The official said that while US biotech research leads the world, the industrial applications are increasingly in the hands of other countries.

‘Unless we translate biotechnology innovation into economic and societal benefits for all Americans, other countries, including and especially China, are aggressively investing in this sector,’ posing a ‘risk,’ the official said.

The White House says the US biotech industry is on the cutting edge of medical advances – recently seen in the rapid development of vaccines, tests and therapeutics to help manage the Covid-19 pandemic — but that the potential scope goes much further.

The official speaking to reporters cited studies suggesting that ‘before the end of the decade, engineering biology holds the potential to be used in manufacturing industry that accounts for more than one third of global output. That’s equivalent to almost $30 trillion in terms of value.’

Growing areas for biotech industry include new plastics and rubbers, jet fuel, and environmentally friendly fertilizers.

The battle against cancer is personal for Biden: his son Beau died of brain cancer in 2015 when Biden was vice president to Barack Obama.

In his speech at the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum in Boston, Biden will lay out how his administration is seeking to slash cancer rates through a systemic revamp of government funding and support for everything from medical research to improving access to healthcare and better environmental conditions.

The linkage to the Moon program will seek to raise public awareness and support ahead of midterm congressional elections where the Democrats face the possibility of a Republican sweep in Congress, something which would severely complicate the next two years of Biden’s first term.

Caroline Kennedy, the US ambassador to Australia and daughter of the assassinated JFK, told CNN she approved of the parallels drawn by Biden in the struggle to conquer the deadly disease.

‘Sixty years after my father challenged Americans to land on the moon, President Biden is welcoming great challenges as new opportunities by setting us on a bold course to end cancer as we know it,’ she said.

Biden’s focus on the cancer fight comes as NASA is once again looking to return to the Moon.

Biden also will name Dr. Renee Wegrzyn, a longtime science adviser and who most recently served at the biotech company Ginkgo Bioworks Holdings Inc, as the first director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, a U.S. government-run biomedical research group.

At Ginkgo, Wegrzyn worked on applying synthetic biology to outpace infectious diseases – including COVID-19 – through biomanufacturing, vaccine innovation, and biosurveillance of pathogens at scale.

She also worked at the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity.

Biden’s speech will be on the 60th anniversary of President Kennedy’s Moonshot speech at Rice University.

In that now famous speech, Kennedy said: ‘We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.’

John F. Kennedy’s ‘Moonshot’ speech launched his goal of putting a man on the moon