The White House has 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.”
President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden announced yesterday 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.”
The eight awardees – seven colleges and universities, plus Cision Vision – are working on projects 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.”
Previous efforts by the Biden-Harris administration to combat cancer include the HHS issuing $9 million in “new awards to 18 HRSA-funded health centers to improve access to life-saving cancer screenings in underserved communities.”
