More than two years ago, President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden reignited the Cancer Moonshot with the goals of reducing the cancer death rate in the United States by at least half—preventing more than 4 million cancer deaths—by 2047, and improving the experience of people who are touched by cancer. As part of this effort, President Biden and Vice President Harris secured bipartisan Congressional support to establish the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) to generate breakthroughs in ways to prevent, detect, and treat cancer and other diseases. In its first two years, ARPA-H has invested more than $400 million to fast-track progress on how we prevent, detect, and treat cancer.
Today in New Orleans, the President and First Lady will announce up to $150 million in ARPA-H awards 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 awardees include: Dartmouth College (Hanover, NH), Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore, MD), Rice University (Houston, TX), Tulane University (New Orleans, LA), University of California, San Francisco (San Francisco, CA), 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-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.
Today’s announcement builds on recent efforts by the Biden-Harris Administration to end cancer as we know it:
- U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in early August issued $9 million in new awards to 18 HRSA-funded health centers to improve access to life-saving cancer screenings in underserved communities. As part of these Accelerating Cancer Screening grants, a program created as part of the Biden Cancer Moonshot in 2022, health centers partner directly with National Cancer Institute-Designated Cancer Centers to expedite patient access to diagnosis and cancer treatment.
- ARPA-H announced a new program in early August, POSEIDON, which will invest in new technologies to develop cancer screenings that accurately detect a number of cancers, even at home, a reality. These innovative Multi-Cancer-Early Detection (MCED) tests could improve outcomes for millions of Americans facing cancer.
- Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services released a proposed rule in July that would, for the first time ever, enable Indian Health Services (IHS) and Tribal facilities to receive separate payment for high-cost drugs for people with Medicare, allowing clinics to provide certain health care services, like cancer treatment, in Tribal communities.
President Biden and First Lady Jill Biden believe beating cancer is something we can do, if we do it together. The $150 million in ARPA-H awards announced today fund research efforts across the country, including:
- Tulane University (award of up to $22.9M), Rice University ($18.0M), and the University of Washington ($21.1M) will develop imaging systems and new techniques to visualize individual cells on the surface of a tumor that has been removed. With these advances, if successful, a surgeon will be able to examine the surface of the removed tissue and assess whether more cancer cells remain in the patient before the surgery is complete. These projects will generate solutions that will be used in operating rooms, in real-time, and without the need for an on-site pathologist.
- Johns Hopkins University ($20.9M), University of California, San Francisco ($15.1M), and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign ($32.6M) will invent new microscopes and other tools to identify microscopic cancer remnants inside the patient to help the surgeon remove all remaining cancer cells before the end of the procedure.
- Dartmouth College ($31.3M), Johns Hopkins University, and Cision Vision ($22.3M), a company specializing in medical imaging, will develop dye-based and other novel techniques that can be used during surgery to help visualize critical, and often hidden, structures like blood vessels and nerves so that damage to the patient is minimized.
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