TAMPA, Fla. – Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis held a news conference Wednesday morning in Tampa to highlight state cancer initiatives.
The governor announced Florida’s Cancer Innovation Fund will make another $60 million available in a round of applications that open this week.
“We’ve already allocated $80 million to support 95 research projects across the state and this year’s additional funding of $60 million brings the total investment over just a couple year period to $140 million, and so that’s a real significant commitment,” he said. “On behalf of the people of Florida, we want to see partnerships between universities, research institutions and health care facilities throughout Florida. We want to see harnessing all the collective expertise and resources to try to produce really strong outcomes.”
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The governor was joined at the USF Health Morsani College of Medicine by Florida first lady Casey DeSantis, Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo and Florida Agency for Health Care Administration Secretary Shevuan Harris.
“We’re at war with cancer. We should all be in it together. If Hospital A has a really good procedure, then Hospital B should be able to utilize this, too, and we shouldn’t have competitive advantages, one over the other. We should make sure that everybody has opportunities to be able to get that good quality of care, innovation and new technologies,” Casey DeSantis said. “(...) Opening up these application processes three to four times a year instead of waiting for the fiscal year to open up one big application window is important. Again, we’re at war with cancer. We don’t have time to wait for a fiscal year.”
Casey DeSantis said the $60 million would be used for two priorities, those being the study of how diet and nutrition play a role in better cancer outcomes and, secondly, generic drug repurposing.
“That’s specifically for things like ivermectin,” Casey DeSantis said of the second priority. ”So I know that that’s been in the news quite a bit and made a lot of news during COVID. Mel Gibson was on Joe Rogan’s podcast and he was talking about people that he was friends with and they overcame Stage 4 cancer, and so here’s my perspective, and I’ve talked to the surgeon general about this: like, that’s generic form, I think it costs like $0.77 per pill. Is there any incentive on the part of some to want to research this when you’re not guaranteed to have a big ROI, right? If you have a novel technology or a pharmaceutical and you have that monopoly and that competitive edge, well then you’re probably going to make a lot more money. If you’re researching something like I mentioned that’s generic, are you going to be able to, A, find a study that you can get the money to be able to fund it, but are you guaranteed revenue for your company going down in the future? I don’t know the answer to that, but I do know that we should look at it."
Along those lines, Dr. Ladapo said the state would begin looking at alternative cancer therapies that don’t have an “inherent financial model” for companies to invest in.
“Merck and Pfizer are not going to be funding those studies, but in the Cancer Innovation Fund, we’re interested in that. There actually are promising clinical trial data from NIH-funded studies that show that that can actually make a difference for patients with cancer, reducing inflammation seems to be a huge area, a huge area of opportunity for prevention and for treatment of cancer and lots of other conditions. So, I hope that we continue to reject the normal and pursue a path that fuels righteous, that feels like we’re actually aiming toward the thing that we want to improve,” Ladapo said.
Taking a question on acetaminophen — sold under the brand name Tylenol, which President Donald Trump and U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Monday linked to autism and said should not be used by pregnant women — Ladapo said Florida’s guidance would “probably be very much in line with where the FDA is” going forward.
“There you have the merger of good intentions and courage. The data are messy. I’ve looked at it some, with acetaminophen and pregnancy, but, again, I think they are at a place that is more honest. They acknowledge that not all the studies show harms, but some of them do show a relationship. It’s not a total explanation for autism by any means, but it does appear to be that it’s reasonable to conclude that it may be contributing to the prevalence of autism in children. So, you know, not all the studies find that, but some of the studies do find that, and some of those studies are very good. So I think that their recommendation is the right place to be, in terms of discouraging its use,” Ladapo said.
Watch the news conference again in the video player below or by clicking here.
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