President Biden and First Lady Jill Biden are visiting Louisiana on Tuesday to announce federal grants of up to $150 million for research projects focused on improving cancer surgery.
The president and first lady will take a tour of Tulane University and speak about how funding from the U.S. Department of Health’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA-H) is being used to advance cancer treatment and discovery as part of the White House’s Cancer Moonshot initiative.
The funds, which will be distributed among eight recipients, will be directed to participants in ARPA-H’s Precision Surgical Interventions program, which focuses on making cancer surgeries more effective and reducing the need for multiple surgeries to remove tumors.
According to the White House, Tulane University will receive up to $22.9 million, Rice University up to $18 million and the University of Washington about $21 million to develop new technology to visualize individual cells on the surface of removed tumors.
The government is giving 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 at Urbana-Champaign to develop new microscopes and other tools to identify tiny remnants of cancer inside patients.
Dartmouth College will receive $31 million, and medical imaging specialist Cision Vision will receive up to $22 million to develop technology to visualize structures such as blood vessels and nerves during surgery.
Tuesday’s event marks the latest announcement strengthening the “Cancer Moonshot,” which Biden relaunched in February 2022 with the goal of halving cancer deaths over the next 25 years and improving the lives of caregivers and cancer survivors.
Ending cancer is personal to Biden, whose son Beau Biden died of brain cancer in 2015 at age 46. The president has spoken about ending cancer throughout his presidency and called it a top priority. He has also positioned it as a bipartisan effort, including as part of a “unity agenda” in his annual State of the Union address.
Last September, the White House announced that it would provide $240 million to researchers and innovators working on cancer-related projects through ARPA-H funding.
