Biden to announce $150 million investment in new cancer surgery technologies

Aug. 13 (UPI) -- The White House on Tuesday awarded $150 million in funds to develop technologies that will help improve success rates for cancer tumor removal.

President Biden and first lady Jill Biden will travel to New Orleans to announce the funding from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, which will go to support eight teams pursuing cutting-edge technologies that are part of the agency's Precision Surgical Intervention program.

The teams that will benefit from the awards include researchers from Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H.; Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore; Rice University in Houston; Tulane University in New Orleans; the University of California, San Francisco; the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; University of Washington in Seattle and Cision Vision, in Mountain View, Calif.

"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 remove all cancerous cells in one surgery," the White House said in a statement.

The Biden administration said ARPA-H has invested more than $400 million since its inception to fast-track progress on how to prevent, detect and treat cancer. Biden reignited his Cancer Moonshot initiative two years ago. The initiative seeks to cut the cancer death rate in half by 2047.

"Since reigniting the Cancer Moonshot in 2022, the Biden-Harris 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 White House said.