WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden’s administration on Thursday announced the first cancer-focused initiative under its advanced health research agency, aiming to help doctors more easily distinguish between cancerous cells and healthy tissue during surgery and improve outcomes for patients.
The administration’s Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, or ARPA-H, is launching a Precision Surgical Interventions program, seeking ideas from the public and private sectors to explore how to dramatically improve cancer outcomes in the coming decades by developing better surgical interventions to treat the disease.
ARPA-H is modeled after the military-focused DARPA, which spawned the internet and GPS. The administration hopes the new investment will yield tools that will help surgeons avoid healthy nerves and blood vessels, while ensuring they can remove all cancerous cells.
ARPA-H, along with the administration’s “cancer moonshot,” is a key part of Biden’s “unity agenda” announced during his 2022 State of the Union address to bring Washington together on a bipartisan basis to combat cancer, improve veterans’ health and make mental health more accessible.
In a statement Thursday announcing the initiative, Biden called it a “major milestone in the fight to end cancer as we know it.”
“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,” Biden said. “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.”
The initiative could markedly improve cancer treatments and make scientific breakthroughs that have as yet unknown applications, said Arati Prabhakar, the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology.
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