Biden Awards $150 Million in Research Grants as Part of Cancer ‘Moonshot’

Freed from the campaign trail and the grinding pursuit of another term, President Biden traveled to New Orleans on Tuesday to focus on a project close to his heart: the “moonshot” effort to sharply cut cancer deaths in the United States that he carried over from his time as vice president and has become a hallmark of his presidency.

Speaking at Tulane University, Mr. Biden and the first lady, Jill Biden, announced eight research centers, including one at Tulane, that will collectively receive $150 million in research awards aimed at pioneering new methods of precision cancer surgery.

Before addressing a crowd on campus, the president and the first lady met with a team of researchers who demonstrated the technology under development at Tulane. It uses imaging of cells on tumor sites to verify for surgeons that cancer cells have been fully removed and to reduce the need for follow-up surgeries.

Standing in front of a sign reading “curing cancer faster,” Mr. Biden described touring cancer centers in Australia and Ireland, and being frustrated by a lack of international collaboration.

“We don’t want to keep information — we want to share it,” he said.

The awards announced on Tuesday are to be made through the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, or ARPA-H, which was founded in 2022 and is aimed at driving biomedical innovation.

The other award recipients were Dartmouth College; Johns Hopkins University; Rice University; the University of California, San Francisco; the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; the University of Washington; and Cision Vision in Mountain View, Calif.

To Mr. Biden, the search for new methods of cancer prevention and treatment is a passion project that began in 2015, when his son Beau died of glioblastoma, an aggressive brain cancer.

In 2016, President Barack Obama called on Mr. Biden to lead the ambitious program to rapidly reduce cancer deaths, with a goal of making “a decade’s worth of advances in cancer prevention, diagnosis and treatment” in five years. Mr. Biden took the helm of the project that year, and revived it as president with frequent visits to leading research centers.

In 2022, his administration set a goal of cutting the death rate from cancer by at least 50 percent by 2047, including by increasing access to early cancer screening and funding research on new treatments and surgical methods.

The president listed the cancer moonshot effort as one of the most precious goals of his waning days in office, citing it in his Oval Office address in which he announced his decision to suspend his 2024 campaign.

“I will keep fighting for my cancer moonshot, so we can end cancer as we know it, because we can do it,” he said.

The first lady, who accompanied the president on Tuesday, has also been vocal about the need for early cancer detection. She started an awareness initiative in 1993 about breast cancer detection after four of her friends were diagnosed with the disease.

Last year, she toured the Louisiana Cancer Research Center with Senator Bill Cassidy, a Republican, to meet with nurses enrolling patients in clinical trials. She also visited Emory University for the launch of the first project funded through ARPA-H, aimed at deploying mRNA technology, which was successfully used to fast-track coronavirus vaccines, to train immune systems to fight cancer.

Despite the prestige of the cancer research taking place there, New Orleans sits in a corridor dense with chemical plants that has become known as Cancer Alley for the increased risk of cancer and other diseases there.

The Biden administration has made a priority of cleaning up those areas and regulating hazardous air pollutants from chemical plants through the Environmental Protection Agency, though many of its rules have run into legal challenges.

Mr. Biden spent little time on Tuesday speaking about environmental justice or his personal loss to cancer. Instead, he focused on the importance of technologies that speed up treatment and lead to better quality of life for patients.

“It steals time; it steals away hope,” he said, echoing Dr. Biden, who had spoken earlier. “We know all families touched by cancer are in a race against time.”

Cancer remains the second leading cause of death in the United States, after heart disease. The American Cancer Society’s annual report this year found that the number of new cancer cases had ticked up to more than two million in 2023, with increases in cancers of the prostate, uterus, oral cavity and liver, among others.

The causes of those increases, particularly in younger people, are not yet well understood, according to the report.

Mr. Biden has stepped up efforts associated with the cancer moonshot with an eye toward cementing progress. Last week, the Department of Health and Human Services awarded $9 million to 18 centers conducting cancer screening.