During his final State of the Union address Tuesday night, President Barack Obama charged his vice president with spearheading a moonshot endeavor to cure cancer. He also asked the American people to support the effort in honor of their family members who have died from the aggressive and multifarious disease.

Indeed, Vice President Joe Biden is intimately familiar with the pain of losing a family member to cancer, a leading cause of death around the globe that kills approximately 8 million people every year. Tuesday night's announcement came about seven months after the death of Biden's son, Beau, from brain cancer.

And in characteristic self-effacement, Biden quipped the next morning to ABCs Robin Roberts that hes not exactly sure what [the mission] entails ." Of course, Biden's joke doesn't give credit to his lifetime of cancer advocacy. Nor does it acknowledge the summit of top cancer researchers he convened in the days before Obama made the announcement.

But it got us thinking -- how, exactly, is the U.S. going to accomplish this? HuffPost asked leading cancer research organizations, scientists and doctors what they want us to know about the mission to cure cancer.

1. This is an achievable goal.

Even now, the notion that we could cure cancer may seem naively optimistic or absurd. But the doctors and scientists in the trenches of cancer treatment are quite confident this could actually happen -- provided the U.S. is as committed and faithful to the cause for the long haul as we seem to be this week.

"Its not pie in the sky, said Dr. Clifford A. Hudis, chief of breast medicine service at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Theres [already] a groundswell of new kinds of drugs that are making life better, even if theyre not curing people.

Scientists have already vastly transformed the experience of a handful of cancers. Take chronic myelogenous leukemia: Before, a person would have to get chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant, whereas now they pop a pill called Gleevec that transforms the cancer into a chronic disease. And certain types of breast cancers can either be completely cured or treated so that people can live with the tumors for a long time.

Dr. Peter Carroll, an associate director at the University of California, San Franciscos Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center, remembers when President Richard Nixon first declared war" on cancer in 1971, and echoed Hudis' statements. While the limited knowledge of cancer at the time meant Nixon's war couldn't exactly be tactical, this one can be.

We dont have all the answers, but we have insights now that weve never had before, and the pace of research is exponential, said Carroll. "Fully understanding cancer as a spectrum of disease, we will cure cancers that were not curable, understand cancers that dont need to be cured, and think of cancer like heart disease or diabetes and match the treatment to the tumor."

2. We're going to need waaaaaaaaay more money.

Last December, the National Institutes of Health secured an extra $2 billion in general funding. While it was a nice shot in the arm for the agency in charge of funding medical research, scientists are going to need a lot more money than that to carry out the experiments needed to cure cancer.

At about 6.6 percent of the its current budget, the extra $2 billion represents the biggest funding increase in 12 years for the NIH, but quickly spreads thin when distributed across many research projects and administrative costs. Experts that spoke to HuffPost were quick to point out that the NIHs spending power had stagnated for a decade or so after the agency's last big increase.

If your salary was slack for 10 years and you got a 10 percent increase, would you conclude that youre doing well? asked Hudis.

The likelihood of any project or idea getting funded reached a historic low in 2013 , thanks to the budget cuts the NIH suffered during sequestration that year. The success rates are only now just starting to tick back up.