Still-The-President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden toured medical facilities at Tulane University on Tuesday that receive federal funding to investigate cancer treatments.
POTUS and FLOTUS were in New Orleans to help announce $150 million in awards from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health as part of the Biden administration's Cancer Moonshot.
“Harnessing the power of innovation is essential to achieving our ambitious goal of turning more cancers from death sentences to treatable diseases and — in time — cutting the cancer death rate in half,” President Biden said late last month at Cancer Moonshot's launch.
“As we’ve seen throughout our history, from developing vaccines to sequencing the genome, when the U.S. government invests in innovation, we can achieve breakthroughs that would otherwise be impossible, and save lives on a vast scale.”
According to the White House, the Cancer Moonshot has announced over 95 new programs, policies, and resources to address five priority actions. More than 170 private companies, non-profits, academic institutions, and patient groups have also stepped up with new actions and collaborations.
The new injection of funding will support eight teams of researchers around the country working on ways to help surgeons more successfully remove tumors from people with cancer.
The project is a personal and emotional cause for the Bidens. Both the President and First Lady have had lesions removed from their skin in the past that were determined to be basal cell carcinoma, a common and easily treated form of cancer. In 2015, their eldest son, Beau, died of an aggressive brain cancer at age 46.
Watch the President's remarks on Cancer Moonshot, below.