President Joe Biden is making a trip to New Orleans on Tuesday to announce a new grant for medical facilities researching ways to cure cancer in his administration’s “moonshot” program aimed at reducing deaths from the disease. Biden and first lady Jill Biden will take part in tours of medical facilities before heading to Tulane University to announce the $150 million in grants from the Advanced Research Agency for Health. The awards will go to eight teams of researchers around the country trying to identify ways for surgeons to have more success removing tumors for people who may have cancer.
Recipients for the awards include 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. Even though Biden decided to drop out of the presidential race and not seek a second term, he has made his cancer moonshot program a priority initiative for the months he has left in office. It is a highly personal issue for him, as his son Beau Biden died of brain cancer in 2015.
Both Biden and the first lady have also had lesions removed from their skin in the past that were found to be a common form of cancer. Cancer is the second leading cause of death for people in the U.S.
behind heart disease. The American Cancer Society estimates that around 2 million new cancer cases will be diagnosed and nearly 612,000 people will die from cancer or related diseases. Since launching the cancer moonshot initiative, the Biden administration has implemented several policy changes that have made screening and getting treatment for cancer more accessible and affordable, which advocates say has put the country on track to drastically reduce the number of deaths caused by the illness.
Biden’s goal is to have the cancer death rate be cut by at least half by 2047..
