President Biden and First Lady Jill Biden will travel to Louisiana on Tuesday to announce up to $150 million in federal awards for research projects focused on improving cancer surgeries.
The President and First Lady will participate in a tour of Tulane University and deliver remarks about how funding from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Healthcare (ARPA-H) is being used to treat and detect cancer as part of the Cancer Moonshot effort of the White House.
The funding, which is being distributed among eight grantees, will go to participants in ARPA-H’s Precision Surgical Interventions program, which focuses on making cancer surgeries more effective to reduce the need for multiple procedures to remove tumors.
Tulane University will receive up to $22.9 million, Rice University will receive up to $18 million, and the University of Washington will receive about $21 million in funding to develop new techniques for visualizing individual cells on the surface of a tumor that has been removed, the White House said.
The government is providing about $21 million to Johns Hopkins University, $15 million to the University of California, San Francisco, and up to $32 million to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign to invent new microscopes and other tools to identify microscopic traces of cancer inside patients.
Dartmouth College will receive $31 million and Cision Vision, a company specializing in medical imaging, will receive up to $22 million for efforts to develop techniques to be used during surgery to help visualize structures such as blood vessels and nerves.
Tuesday’s event will mark the latest announcement to bolster the Cancer Moonshot, which Biden relaunched in February 2022 with the goal of halving the cancer death rate over the next 25 years and improving the lives of cancer caregivers and survivors. .
The cause to end cancer has been personal for Biden, whose son, Beau Biden, died of brain cancer in 2015 at age 46. The president spoke about ending cancer during his presidency, saying it would be a priority for him. He also framed it as a bipartisan effort, including it every year in the State of the Union as part of his “unity agenda.”
The White House announced last September that it would provide $240 million to researchers and innovators working on cancer-related projects through ARPA-H funding.
This story originally appeared on thehill.com read the full story
