WASHINGTON -- Vice President Joe Biden is bringing the personal touch to the White House's new assault on cancer.
After watching her brother battle multiple types of cancer for 12 years before his death in October at age 21, Raha Assadi-Lamouki had written a letter to the White House, but she never expected to hear back from the VP. On Monday, she did.
"He told me he was sorry that he and I had something in common like this," Assadi-Lamouki, a 24-year-old law clerk from Minnesota, told The Star Tribune.
In their 16-minute conversation, Assadi-Lamouki said the two discussed Biden's son Beau, who died of brain cancer at 46 last May. They also spoke of the suffering that cancer brings to patients and their loved ones.
"For me, obviously a cure is very important, but I saw Roozie go through 12 years of cancer treatment," Assadi-Lamouki said, referencing her brother Roozbeh. "What cancer treatment does to someone's body and their life is really, really hard to watch. Not just losing your hair, not just the physical aspects of it, but the mind and the heart. ... So that part is really important to me, the research behind finding friendlier cancer treatments."
The discussion eventually turned to the White House's Cancer Moonshot Task Force, which held its first meeting on Monday. President Barack Obama announced in his final State of the Union address that Biden would chair the project. Obama will also ask Congress for $755 million in the next budget for new cancer-related research through the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration.
The task force is focusing not just on how to boost cancer research, but on how to help patients and their loved ones as well.
"Every single one of them will matter when it comes to making concrete progress toward ending cancer as we know it," Biden said in a statement last week.
After Monday's meeting, Biden also made a call to Wendy Hoke, a 48-year-old Ohio woman with breast cancer who had reached out to him offering help on the initiative.
"So how are you feeling now, kiddo?" Biden said in the call. "Chemo's a bear."
You can hear the audiotape of the call, released by the White House, below:
This article originally stated that Raha Assadi-Lamouki's brother suffered from leukemia. It has been updated to clarify that he had multiple types of cancer.
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