WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - President Joe Biden has announced up to $150 million in ARPA-H funding that will go to some of the United States' cutting-edge cancer research institutions.
Announcing the funding at an event in New Orleans, Biden explained how the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health program is fast-tracking progress in how to prevent, treat, and detect cancer.
The funds wil be used to develop technologies that will allow surgeons to provide more successful tumor removal surgeries for people facing cancer. These awards will support researchers from eight teams across the country who are pursuing innovative ideas as part of ARPA-H's Precision Surgical Interventions (PSI) program.
For the nearly two million Americans who are newly diagnosed with solid tumor cancers each year, surgical removal is often the first step in their treatment. PSI aims to make these surgeries more effective, reducing the need for repeat surgeries and decreasing the damage to healthy tissue, ultimately saving and extending lives.
The first eight institutions that have been awarded the funding include Dartmouth College (Hanover, NH); Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore, MD); Rice University (Houston, TX); Tulane University (New Orleans, LA); University of California, San Francisco; University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (Champaign, IL); University of Washington (Seattle, WA); and Cision Vision (Mountain View, CA).
These projects are working to improve key aspects of the surgical experience from improving surgeons' ability to visualize important structures like blood vessels and nerves throughout surgery, to developing next-generation microscopes and imaging technology that help them remove all cancerous cells in one surgery.
Since reigniting the Cancer Moonshot in 2022, the Biden Administration has mobilized the Federal Government and private companies, healthcare providers, research institutions, and patient and advocacy groups to accelerate progress on prevention, early detection, innovation, and support for patients and their families.
The president and the first lady's leadership on the Cancer Moonshot has delivered significant results to achieve the ambitious goals they set to reduce the cancer death rate by at least half in the U.S. by 2047.
In its first two years, the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health has invested more than $400 million to fast-track progress on how to prevent, detect, and treat cancer.
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