President Biden has had a deep personal interest in cancer research since his son Beau died of an aggressive brain cancer in 2015.
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.