What’s Joe Biden Doing Now? SXSW Speech On Cancer 'Moonshot' Fight Scheduled For Sunday In Austin

Former Vice President Joe Biden has largely stayed out of public life since leaving office in January but the former senator will speak about fighting cancer Sunday at the South By Southwest (SXSW) film and music festival in Austin, Texas, Deadline reported Monday.

Biden is scheduled to outline plans for his Biden Cancer Initiative, or what he called in January his “cancer moonshot” agenda in an attempt to eradicate the disease. According to the National Cancer Institute, an estimated 1,685,210 new cases of cancer were expected to be diagnosed in the U.S. in 2016 with 595,690 people expected to die from it.

“We’re excited to have Vice President Biden address the creative innovators and entrepreneurs that attend SXSW,” the festival’s chief programming officer Hugh Forrest said in a statement according to Deadline. “His commitment and leadership is crucial at a time when the smartest minds from the worlds of technology and healthcare are working together to create groundbreaking new solutions in the battle to end cancer.”

The speech is scheduled for 3:30 p.m. EST local time and will be open to all SXSW attendees, while an online stream was also put in place. The festival begins Friday and runs through March 19.

When Biden first announced his plan to fight cancer in January, he said the initiative would hone in on helping researchers improve how data is collected, improve the availability of care to patients and encourage pharmaceutical and health insurance companies to make drugs and treatments easier to buy, the Associated Press reported.

The cause likely took on a very personal meaning for Biden as his time in the White House came to a close. Biden’s son, Beau, who served as Delaware’s attorney general and was an Iraq veteran, died in May 2015 after battling brain cancer.

"Beau Biden was, quite simply, the finest man any of us have ever known," Joe Biden said in a statement after the death was announced.