Vice president Joe Biden’s Cancer Moonshot now has a flight plan, drafted by a blue-ribbon panel and published in September. Coming as it does in the final year of president Obama’s term in office, there are doubts about whether the ambitious $1 billion program—aimed at achieving 10 years’ progress in cancer research and treatment in a five-year period—will ever get off the launching pad.

Nonetheless, two pathologists involved with the initiative say it has already spurred creative thinking about how to break down silos within the cancer community and reinforced the central role diagnostics will play in detecting, preventing, and better understanding cancer.

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