Beau Biden: Moving tributes to Joe Biden's son during final night of DNC 2020

Former vice president's son who died of cancer in 2015 memorialised as Joe Biden accepts nomination

The final night of the 2020 Democratic National Convention featured tributes to Beau Biden, the presidential nominee's son who died following a brain cancer diagnosis in 2015.

Joseph "Beau" Biden III, an Iraq War veteran and Delaware attorney general, was 46.

"He's the one who wanted me to stay engaged," Joe Biden said in a video that introduced Thursday's prime-time event. "He was worried that I would not continue to fight for the things I'm passionate about, and I'm trying to keep that promise."

Under Barack Obama's administration, then-vice president Biden launched a "Cancer Moonshot" programme aimed at ending the disease.

Beau Biden had experienced a stroke in 2010 and was treated three years later at MD Anderson Cancer Centre in Houston, Texas, where doctors removed a lesion from his brain.

But his cancer returned, and he received aggressive treatment at Walter Reed National Military Medical Centre in Bethesda, Maryland.

He was survived by his wife Hallie and his two children Natalie and Hunter.

Beau Biden was 2 years old when his mother Neilia was killed in the crash that also took the life of his sister Naomi. Beau and his brother Hunter, then 3 years old, were also in the car. Their father was set to be sworn into his first term as a junior US senator from Delaware.

During his 2012 speech at the convention, in a speech introducing his father's renomination to vice presidency, Beau Biden was moved to tears.

"One of my earliest memories was being in that hospital, Dad always at our side," he said. "He decided not to take the oath of office. He said, 'Delaware can get another senator, but my boys can't get another father.' However, great men like Ted Kennedy, Mike Mansfield, Hubert Humphrey – men who had been tested themselves – convinced him to serve. So he was sworn in, in the hospital, at my bedside."

Film remembering Beau Biden shown at DNC 2020

Biden famously made a daily commute to Washington DC by train, earning him the nickname Amtrak Joe, as he raised his two young boys.

Another video on Thursday pulled from then-president's remarks from his eulogy for Beau Biden.

"Beau didn't cut corners," Obama said. "He turned down an appointment to be Delaware's attorney general so he could win it fair and square. When the field was clear for him to run for the Senate, he chose to finish his job as AG instead."

Convention emcee and actor Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who was diagnosed with cancer in 2017, said that "one of the first people to call me was Joe."

"Our current president has made me cry but it has never had anything to do with his warmth or kindness," she said.