CLEVELAND -- President Obama says curing cancer will be the next "moonshot" for the United States, putting Vice President Joe Biden in charge of the initiative.

"Last year, Vice President Biden said with a new moonshot, America can cure cancer," President Obama said in last night's State of the Union speech. "Last month, he worked with the congress to give scientists at the National Institutes of Health the strongest resources that they've had in over a decade."

Joe Biden's son Beau, the Delaware Attorney General, died of brain cancer last year at age 46.

"The fact this, although it's been about a year in the making, actually made it to the front burner for the President is astonishing and could be a game-changer," says Stan Gerson, MD, Director of the University Hospitals Seidman Cancer Center and the National Cancer Institute-designated Case Comprehensive Cancer Center.

"We need to have more fundamental research, more money coming to the National Cancer Institute, the National Institutes of Health," says Dr. Gerson, who, in line with the President's space mission metaphor, has a grant with NASA to study cosmic radiation and the effect on stem cells in astronauts.

With the ability to collect so much data, Dr. Gerson says the person at the computer now becomes as important as the person with the test tube and the person caring for the patient, calling for a three-pronged approach to treating cancer. In 2015, doctors diagnosed more than 1.6 million cancer cases in the U.S, and 500,000 died from cancer.

Although Dr. Gerson says they've had success treating many types of cancer, there are other types that need more attention and he doesn't expect a cure in the next generation, especially since we're living longer. He still says the initiative will help significantly. "We're now on the verge where those dollars can be incredibly well-spent and the return on that investment will be longer lives for patients, many more cures, but certainly longer lives and a better lifestyle for patients," says Dr. Gerson. But he also understands the challenge. "Curing cancer is a lot more complicated than any moonshot or any space mission is going to be."

Sound bites from Stan Gerson, MD, Director of the University Hospitals Seidman Cancer Center and the National Cancer Institute-designated Case Comprehensive Cancer Center, and b-roll are available for download on University Hospitals Case Medical Center Newsroom www.news.uhhospitals.org/.