Washington.- Freed from the campaign trail and his attempt to win another term, President Biden traveled to New Orleans on Tuesday to focus on a project that is very close to his heart: the “ambitious” project of significantly reducing cancer deaths in the United States that he has tried to achieve since he was vice president and that has become a distinctive feature of his presidency.
Speaking at Tulane University, Biden and first lady Jill Biden announced eight research centers, including one at Tulane, that will collectively receive $150 million in research awards focusing on new precision methods in cancer surgery.
Before addressing the crowd on campus, the president and first lady met with a team of researchers who demonstrated technology under development at Tulane.
The technique uses tumor cells to verify that surgeons have completely removed cancer cells and reduce the need for patients to undergo follow-up surgeries.
Standing in front of a sign reading “cure cancer faster,” Biden described touring cancer centers in Australia and Ireland and expressed frustration at the lack of international collaboration.
“We don’t want to keep information, we want to share it,” he said.
Other honorees include Dartmouth College, Johns Hopkins University, Rice University, the University of California at San Francisco, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of Washington and Cison Vision in Mountain View, California.
For Biden, the search for new methods for cancer prevention and treatment is a passion project that began in 2015, when his son Beau died of Glioblastoma, an aggressive brain cancer.
In 2022, his administration set a goal of reducing the number of cancer deaths by at least 50 percent by 2047, including increasing access to early cancer screening and funding for research into new treatments and surgical methods.
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