Cancer Moonshot: Video Replay of Joe Biden's Davos Roundtable

Vice President Joe Biden today convened an array of cancer research and treatment experts at the Davos World Economic Forum to discuss advancing the fight against cancer. Watch the video replay below; after Biden's introductory comments, the panelists start weighing in at about 24 minutes:

The special session was moderated by Francis S. Collins, director of the U.S. National Institutes of Health.  The panelists were Jennifer Doudna, Sylvia Matthews Burwell, Paula T. Hammond, Elizabeth Blackburn, David B. Agus, Charles Sawyers, José Baselga, Delos M. (Toby) Cosgrove, Bill McDermott.

You can read about today's discussion at the World Economic Discussion website. Topics included: personalized medicine,  the role of big data, the difficulty of recruiting patients for clinical trials, and the potential of CRISPR, a gene editing technique that Science magazine called the 2015 breakthrough of the year.

Biden launched the "moonshot" initiative last Friday to hasten a cancer cure, aiming to use his final year in office to break down barriers in the medical world he said are holding back progress on eradicating the dreaded disease.

Biden has described a system in which competition, territorialism and "stove-piping" of information leave researchers and their discoveries cloistered in their own corners. His campaign this year will work to encourage more data-sharing about patient data and treatment outcomes.

"My hope is that I can be a catalyst, to oversimplify it, to get everybody on the same page," Biden said.

A key focus will be promising advances such as immunotherapy. At the cancer center Biden visited Friday, researchers are exploring what's known as chimeric antigen receptor technology, in which a patient's immune cells are engineered outside of their body to hunt for tumors, then infused back into the patient's body. The White House said 250 patients have been treated with the approach, with early promising results.

Another priority for the vice president is to further "precision medicine," which personalizes treatments based on the genetic makeup of a patient's tumors. Cancer researchers who met with Biden recently said he was intrigued by the possibilities for improving prevention and early detection.

Biden will next chair a series of meetings with Cabinet secretaries about ways to boost federal funds.

Associated Press contributed to this report.