NEW ORLEANS (CN) — President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden visited Tulane University on Tuesday as part of the Biden Cancer Moonshot Initiative.
Earlier that same day, his administration had announced $150 million in new grants for cancer research from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health. The agency, a part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, was started in 2022 with the goal of funding medical breakthroughs. To date, it's given out $400 million in grants.
During the visit, the Bidens also spoke from personal experience about the agony of cancer.
Both Bidens have dealt with basal cell carcinoma, a common type of skin cancer. They also lost their son Joseph "Beau" Biden III to cancer in 2015.
“When Joe and I lost our son to brain cancer, we decided to turn our pain into something positive,” Jill Biden, Beau's stepmother, explained at the start of Tuesday’s speaking event.
In his own remarks, President Biden said cancer surgery “takes the best surgeons and takes its toll on families.”
“That anxiety — waiting for the unknown — is excruciating,” Biden said of the current status quo, in which cancer patients sometimes wait for days to learn whether a doctor successfully removed cancerous cells.
New technologies will offer doctors a way to visualize tumors at the time they are operating, reducing the need for follow-ups, Biden said. Such technologies would provide a “road map doctors can follow.”
That breakout technology, which DHHS is funding, is part of the initiative's effort to reduce cancer deaths by half.
“We’re moving quickly because we know that all families touched by cancer are in a race against time,” Biden said.
As he prepares to leave office, Biden said he wanted to make sure the U.S. took up fighting cancer as a "national purpose." It's a goal he first announced in 2022.
“I’m a congenital optimist about what Americans can do," Biden said. "There’s so much that we’re doing. It matters."
Among those receiving awards on Tuesday were researchers from Tulane University, 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, a medical device company focused on cancer that's headquartered in Mountain View, California.
Before his remarks at Tulane, the president and first lady toured medical facilities that receive federal cancer treatment funding, where researchers demonstrated how they are working to improve scanning technology to more quickly discern cancerous cells during surgeries. The grant money will support researchers nationwide who are working to improve tumor detection.
For Joe Biden, Tuesday's visit to Tulane was somewhat of a return-to-campus moment: His youngest daughter Ashley is a Tulane graduate.
“It’s an honor to be back at Tulane without having to pay tuition," the president quipped at the start of his remarks.
“I’m not kidding," he added as the crowd laughed.
Despite the early death of Beau Biden and the family connections to Tulane, President Biden stressed his initiative wasn't personal but for the country.
“Anything we set our mind to is possible,” the president said. “We are the land of possibility.”
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