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WASHINGTON—The White House on Monday said its "cancer moonshot" initiative is paying off in such areas as the digital storage of large groups of genetic data and research into environmental causes, but it urged Congress to approve funding for the venture.

The drive, headed up by Vice President Joe Biden, is aimed at attaining a decade's worth of new medical therapies and scientific knowledge about cancers within five years. The administration has been trying for months to get Congress to approve money for the $1 billion effort, along with funding for a precision-medicine initiative and an infusion of money for the National Institutes of Health.

Mr. Biden gave more details of the campaign's medical and technical accomplishments on Monday. He announced, for instance, a joint effort by the National Cancer Institute, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Corp. to build a model for keeping the genetic data of large populations stored in the computer cloud.

Another project involves linking potentially 250,000 cancer and genetic cell samples from the Department of Defense to information stored at the Environmental Protection Agency to research environmental factors that cause or promote cancer growth.

"The mission of this Cancer Moonshot is not to start another war on cancer," said Mr. Biden in a report Monday to the president, "but to win the one President Nixon declared in 1971." President Barack Obama announced plans for the research campaign in this year's State of the Union address, giving it that name due to far-reaching goals that he likened to President John F. Kennedy's pledge to land a man on the moon.

During a press briefing Monday on the cancer initiative, both Messrs Obama and Biden clearly had their eyes on history.

"Although we're going to be leaving soon, we're going to leave behind a framework to organize these efforts for several years," said Mr. Obama, who was seated in the Oval Office next to the vice president and his wife, Jill Biden.

Mr. Biden, who lost his son Beau to brain cancer, said, "I'm going to devote the rest of my life to this."

Such top Republicans as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, House Speaker Paul Ryan of Wisconsin and Senate health committee Chairman Lamar Alexander of Tennessee have vowed to push legislation after the November election that would come up with new funding as well as money for the NIH and other agencies.

What form the measure might take is uncertain, as several provisions in the version passed by the House last year have drawn opposition because of limits they would place on drug and device regulation by the Food and Drug Administration.

One person familiar with current talks in the House said that new funding for the NIH, the research campaign and Mr. Obama's precision-medicine project could be roughly half to two-thirds of the nearly $10 billion over five years that the House l ast year designated for such entities. But the talks are in preliminary stages.

One emphasis of the vice president has been collaboration among cancer researchers. On Monday, he said barriers to progress on cancer include "incentive structures that encourage and reward individual success rather than cross-discipline and cross-sector collaboration."

Another project mentioned in a report Monday of his task force described a partnership between the cancer institute and 20 to 30 drug and biotechnology companies to speed up cancer researchers' broader access to investigational and other drugs.

In his report to Mr. Obama, the vice president said that "instead of 20 companies each studying the same thing and not sharing the results, they'll be able to see each other's findings and build upon the results more quickly."

Write to Thomas M. Burton at tom.burton@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

October 17, 2016 19:15 ET (23:15 GMT)

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