President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden on Tuesday announced a $150 million investment in technology to improve tumor removal surgeries as a part of the administration’s new research agency, the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, or ARPA-H.
Biden has made “eliminating cancer as we know it” a hallmark of his presidency. He relaunched the “Cancer Moonshot” in 2022 — after it began in 2016 under then-President Barack Obama — with the goal of cutting the cancer death rate by at least half in the U.S. by 2047.
The issue is personal to him: Biden lost his son Beau to glioblastoma, a rare brain cancer, in 2015.