More than 2 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 2 years, ARPA-H has invested more than $400 million to fast-track progress on how we prevent, detect, and treat cancer.
On August 13 in New Orleans, the President and First Lady announced 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 2 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 damage to healthy tissue, ultimately saving and extending lives.
The first eight institutions awarded ARPA-H PSI funding are Dartmouth College; Johns Hopkins University; Rice University; Tulane University; the University of California, San Francisco; the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; the University of Washington; and Cision Vision (a company specializing in medical imaging).
New ARPHA-H–Funded Research
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. Some examples of specific research efforts include:
- Tulane University (award of up to $22.9 million), Rice University ($18.0 million), and the University of Washington ($21.1 million) 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 onsite pathologist.
- Johns Hopkins University ($20.9 million); the University of California, San Francisco ($15.1 million); and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign ($32.6 million) 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 ($31.3 million), Johns Hopkins University, and Cision Vision ($22.3 million) 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.
Further Progress in Cancer Research and Treatment
The ARPA-H funding announcement builds on recent efforts by the Biden-Harris Administration to end cancer as we know it:
- The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services issued $9 million in new awards to 18 Health Resources and Services Administration–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. These innovative multicancer early detection tests could improve outcomes for millions of Americans facing cancer.
- The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services released a proposed rule in July that would, for the first time ever, enable Indian Health Services 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.
