Biden announces $150 million 'Cancer Moonshot' investment

President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden on Tuesday announced a $150 million investment in technology to improve tumor removal surgeries as a part of the administration’s new research agency, the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, or ARPA-H.

Biden has made “eliminating cancer as we know it” a hallmark of his presidency. He relaunched the “Cancer Moonshot” in 2022 — after it began in 2016 under then-President Barack Obama — with the goal of cutting the cancer death rate by at least half in the U.S. by 2047.

The issue is personal to him: Biden lost his son Beau to glioblastoma, a rare brain cancer, in 2015.

With his presidency coming to an end within the next six months, Biden said Tuesday that he believes the “Cancer Moonshot” will continue and ultimately reach that goal. Biden said that since the agency was founded in 2022, ARPA-H has set aside roughly $400 million to combat cancer, and during his administration the National Cancer Institute has received $25 billion.

“There’s still more to do but we know we can do it,” Biden said of ongoing cancer research. “It’s all about sharing data, sharing information.”

The newly announced funds will be awarded to eight teams across the country as part of ARPA-H’s Precision Surgical Interventions program. The institutions include Dartmouth College in New Hampshire; Johns Hopkins University in Maryland,; Rice University in Texas; Tulane University in Louisiana; the University of California, San Francisco; the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; the University of Washington; and Cision Vision, based in California.

Nearly 2 million Americans are diagnosed with solid tumor cancers each year, and surgical removal is often the first step in treatment. The ARPA-H surgical interventions program is trying to make these surgeries more effective and precise by decreasing the damage to healthy tissue, eliminating all the cancer cells and reducing the need for repeat surgeries.

Cancer rates have been steadily rising in the years since the COVID-19 pandemic, and the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network anticipates cancer cases will reach an all-time high this year.

“Funding more researchers across the country focused on more effective and innovative treatments will bring us closer to future cancer breakthroughs and ending cancer as we know it, for everyone,” Karen E. Knudsen, CEO of the American Cancer Society and the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network, said of the new award.