Rice recipient of Biden's new cancer-fighting grant
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President Biden speaks in New Orleans this week. Photo: Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images
Rice University is among eight institutions awarded new federal money for cancer research. The $18 million grant, spanning five years, will fund the development of a system to improve tumor removal accuracy for breast and head-and-neck cancers.
Why it matters: President Joe Biden announced $150 million in federal awards this week as part of his cancer "moonshot" initiative, which aims to cut the cancer death rate in half by 2047.
- Biden launched his moonshot initiative at Rice in 2016 as vice president. He reignited it in 2022.
The big picture: He and first lady Jill Biden said they know the pain of cancer after the death of their son Beau and want to change that for others. Now that the president is not pursuing a second term, he's focusing on policies dear to him.
- "We are the land of possibilities," he said, adding that the funding will help get new tools into operating rooms.
Zoom in: Nearly 2 million Americans are diagnosed with solid-tumor cancers each year, and surgical removal is often the first step in their treatment, per the White House.
- Rice researchers are working on AccessPath, a system that will help surgeons see in real time whether they have completely removed the tumor and all cancer cells while the patient is still in surgery.
- "The development of a new low-cost technology that enables immediate margin assessment could transform the landscape of surgical oncology," said surgeon Ana Paula Refinetti, a lead researcher on the project.
Flashback: This summer, the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center and Rice University announced a collaboration to advance cancer research and develop new technologies for cancer detection and therapy.
Zoom out: Seven other teams are working on additional developments geared at making tumor-removal surgeries more successful.
- The awardees are Tulane University, Dartmouth College, Johns Hopkins University, University of California San Francisco, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, University of Washington and Cision Vision in California.
- Their projects include inventing a new microscope and creating new imaging systems to visualize blood vessels and nerves.
By the numbers: The money is coming from the federal Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health.
- In its first two years, ARPA-H has invested more than $400 million to fast-track progress on how Americans prevent, detect and treat cancer, the White House said.
Context: Biden has five more months to cement his health care legacy.
- He ran for office primarily on a health care agenda and says his top accomplishments as president were lowering prescription drug costs for seniors and expanding coverage to a record number of Americans.