The White House announced Tuesday $150 million in new federal funding for research targeting the development of tumor-removal technologies.
The funding will be awarded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) to eight research institutions across the country. President Joe Biden established the agency in 2022.
“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,” said the White House in a press release. “[ARPA-H’s Precision Surgical Interventions (PSI) program] 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 funding is part of President Biden’s ‘cancer moonshot’ — a goal to cut the cancer death rate in the United States by at least half, preventing more than 4 million cancer deaths by 2047. The cancer moonshot was first established by President Barack Obama in 2016 and then reignited by Biden in 2022.
Since 2022, ARPA-H has invested over $400 million to fast-track projects for preventing, detecting, and treating cancer.
The eight awardees include Dartmouth College, Johns Hopkins University, Rice University, Tulane University, University of California, San Francisco, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, University of Washington, and Cision Vision in 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,” the White House said.