Biden to announce funding for research on cancer surgeries as part of Moonshot effort

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 at Tulane University and deliver remarks on how funding from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) is being used to treat and detect cancer as part of the White House’s Cancer Moonshot effort.

The funding, which is being distributed among eight recipients, is going toward participants in ARPA-H’s Precision Surgical Interventions program, which is focused 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 roughly $21 million in funding to develop new techniques to visualize individual cells on the surface of a tumor that has been removed, the White House said.

The government is providing roughly $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 cancer remnants 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 like 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 to cut the cancer death rate in half over the next 25 years and improve the lives of caregivers and cancer survivors.

The cause of ending cancer has been personal for Biden, whose son, Beau Biden, died of brain cancer in 2015 at the age of 46. The president has talked about ending cancer throughout his presidency, saying it would be a priority for him. He has also framed it as a bipartisan effort, including it each year at the State of the Union as part of his “unity agenda.”

The White House last September announced it would provide $240 million to researchers and innovators working on cancer-related projects through ARPA-H funding.