Designating the United States Courthouse Located At 300 South Fourth Street in Minneapolis, Minnesota, As the ``Diana E. Murphy United States Courthouse''

Floor Speech

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Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, it was good to get back home to Texas over the weekend and on Columbus Day. I had a chance to travel to far West Texas, out to El Paso, TX, and catch up with some of my friends and constituents there on some important issues they care an awful lot about.

While we in Washington have been focused on Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation to the U.S. Supreme Court for the last 90 days or so, a lot of other important things have been happening back in Texas and around the country.

For example, on August 1, Dr. Jim Allison, affiliated with the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, won the Nobel Prize in medicine, along with a researcher from Japan. This is really important work. It was a culmination of 25 years of effort, and I am sure something Jim would have never even dreamed of as he grew up in the small town of Alice, TX, 45 minutes from Corpus Christi. He has come a long way since then. We are very proud of him, and today we send our congratulations to Dr. Allison and to the entire MD Anderson team on a tremendous accomplishment.

Dr. Allison developed a new way to treat cancer using T cells. His method unleashes a patient's immune system to attack tumors. In other words, it is your own immune system that is triggered to attack the tumors that are attacking the patient. This is called immune checkpoint therapy. It has resulted in the development of numerous drugs that have the potential to save lives. None other than our former President, Jimmy Carter, is now cancer free because of this type of therapy, but he is just one of the most famous of many examples.

In the not so distant past, cancer could be treated in only one of three ways: through surgery, radiation, or chemotherapy. A friend of mine gave me the book--I think it was a Pulitzer Prize winning book-- called ``The Emperor of All Maladies,'' which was also a documentary. To be honest, the way that the medical profession treated cancer in the early days was pretty primitive: surgery, radiation, or chemotherapy. But now, thanks to people like Dr. Allison and MD Anderson, cancer patients have other options.

Dr. Allison is sometimes referred to as the ``Godfather of cancer immunotherapy,'' and the drugs he has helped to develop have now been approved to treat not only melanoma and lung cancer but also Hodgkins lymphoma and cancers of the kidney, bladder, liver and stomach.

But despite the great strides made by this Nobel Prize-winning Texan, immunotherapy is still in the very early stages of development. Dr. Allison said there are nearly 2,000 immunotherapy trials in progress around the Nation, including 200 at MD Anderson alone. That gives my colleagues an idea of the number of people and the ongoing efforts that are working to extend the scientific frontiers of cancer treatment.

Much of this work, of course, would not be possible without the funding that is provided by the American taxpayer through State and Federal funding. The National Institutes of Health remains the largest funding mechanism, but in Texas we have done our part by investing $3 billion over 10 years through the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas, commonly known as CPRIT.

Here in the Senate and in the House, working together with the administration, we have been promoting cancer research in several overlapping ways. I recently met with Dr. Shanlin Shah and learned about the fascinating proton therapy that MD Anderson has pioneered. Conversations like that are a great way that we in Congress, who are obviously not experts, can try to stay on top of rapidly advancing research.

But even more important is what we do here collectively to fund that research. We have increased funding by $2 billion to the National Institutes of Health. With that increase, close to $6 billion is now going to the National Cancer Institute, and an additional $100 million is being put toward the so-called Cancer Moonshot that Joe Biden and others touted and which all of us working together voted to create. The Moonshot will accelerate research regarding high mortality cancers.

As a part of the Moonshot initiative, the National Institutes of Health has partnered with biopharmaceutical companies to launch what is known as the Partnership for Accelerating Cancer or PACT, as it is called. PACT is a 5-year public-private research collaboration totaling $215 million. Hopefully, it will identify new biomarkers and develop new immunotherapy treatments.

Dr. Allison, whom I mentioned earlier, has spoken about how crucial this government funding effort really is. Of course, like I said, while we are caught up in the fights of the day here on the floor of the Senate, a lot of good work gets done that the American people don't hear about. So that is why it is so important to emphasize this point.

While biotech and pharmaceutical companies fund the late-stage research that brings well-developed therapies into clinical trials, the early funding of basic science, which makes that possible, often comes from the money provided by the U.S. Government through the National Institutes of Health. Without it, Dr. Allison said, ``many of the therapies that currently treat millions of cancer patients worldwide simply wouldn't exist.''

That is an important point too. It is not just treating cancer here in America. The science and the developments, the research and the cures that are developed at places like MD Anderson Hospital in Houston, TX, benefit the whole world.

I remember one of the last times I was at MD Anderson for a townhall meeting with Senator McConnell, the majority leader, and Senator John McCain, our recently departed colleague from Arizona. At the time, I was told that patients from 90 different countries come to MD Anderson in Houston, TX, because of their expertise treating cancer.

So this is not just a local or national phenomenon. This is a worldwide phenomenon.

It is not just the government, of course, that helps to fund this important research. Philanthropists are also invaluable when it comes to this sort of research as well. I am thinking about my friends Peggy and Lowry Mays of San Antonio, TX. Thanks to their generosity, San Antonio's premier cancer center, which is one of only four in Texas with the National Cancer Institute's elite designation, is entering into an entirely new era. Their donations and their generosity will provide an endowment to support the director of the cancer center, and it will also fund new faculty recruitment and retention initiatives for generations to come. This is just another way that generous people with big hearts are making a difference. It is not just government. It is government working together with people like the Mays to get these things done.

What all of this shows, of course, is that when serious and sustained effort is applied and money is invested, there is a lot of progress that we can make in dealing with things that never would have even been considered treatable years earlier, not that many years ago, and there is always more to be learned.

This calls to mind something the great Thomas Edison, the inventor of the light bulb, once said: ``When you have exhausted all possibilities, remember this--you haven't.'' We haven't exhausted all possibilities, as Dr. Allison's path-breaking work clearly shows--not even close. We have so much more to discover and understand. With science advancing at practically lightning speed, I believe it is not a question of if we cure cancer but when.

That comes as good news for families all across this country of ours because almost no family has been spared. Even when we don't have a close friend or immediate family member who has undergone radiation treatment or chemotherapy, we know stories of famous people, such as Steve Jobs, Aretha Franklin, and even our friend John McCain, recently departed. They passed away from pancreatic cancer and glioblastoma. For others we know, it was oral cancer or lung cancer. Cancer respects no persons and observes no differences between the wealthy and the poor or race or ethnicity. But if we are lucky, we are also blessed to know cancer survivors who, thanks to medical innovation, have a new shot at life. They have undergone hardships and treatment that the rest of us might find difficult to even imagine, but they have endured by their spirit, and they have inspired all of us to keep working, whether it be at the Mays Cancer Center in San Antonio, at MD Anderson in Houston, or up here in Washington, where we work to fund research through legislation. Like Thomas Edison said, we will never exhaust all of the possibilities, so we must not give up. We must keep trying.

Working with generous donors, as well as undaunted scientific researchers like Dr. Allison and his team, I hope we will continue to apply our time and talents to finding answers and yielding newer and greater discoveries.

To all the younger generations--some in towns not unlike Alice, TX-- to all of those who are wondering what they might want to be when they grow up, look no further than Dr. Jim Allison. Look how much he has accomplished through his life's work. He is a good example of the type of person you can aspire to be and what is possible if you try.

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