WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden is zeroing in on the policy goals closest to his heart now that he's no longer seeking a second term and will visit New Orleans on Tuesday to promote his administration's "moonshot" initiative aiming at dramatically reducing cancer deaths. The president and first lady Jill Biden will tour medical facilities, then, at Tulane University, will help announce $150 million in awards from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health. Those will support eight teams of researchers around the country working on ways to help surgeons more successfully remove tumors for people facing cancer.
The teams receiving awards include ones from Tulane, 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, California. Before he leaves office in January, Biden hopes to move the U.S.
closer to the goal he set in 2022 to cut U.S. cancer fatalities by 50% over the next 25 years, and to improve the lives of caregivers and those suffering from cancer.
Experts say the objective is attainable — with adequate investments. “We’re curing people of diseases that we previously thought were absolutely intractable and not survivable,” said Karen Knudsen, CEO of the American Cancer Society and the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network. Cancer is the second-highest killer of people in the U.
S. a.