President Joe Biden took a break this week from the Elect Harris campaign trail, to advance policy goals close to his heart – the administration’s “moonshot” initiative to dramatically reduce cancer deaths.  

At Tulane University, the president, along with First Lady Jill Biden, visited researchers whose revolutionary scanner could help “to end cancer as we know it” –  as the president often describes the Biden Cancer Moonshot Initiative – and announced $150 million in awards to support eight research teams across the country, including the team at Tulane, whose work will help surgeons better remove tumors from cancer patients. 

Of the grant announced by Biden on Tuesday, $23 million went to a team of Tulane-led researchers for MAGIC-SCAN – the Machine-learning Assisted Gigantic Image Cancer margin scanner, which promises to be one of the world’s fastest high-resolution tissue scanners. 

Money for the awards comes from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, a federal funding agency established by the Biden Administration to rapidly advance biomedical research. Tulane researchers will use their grant to overcome technical computing and engineering challenges so that MAGIC-SCAN can become a reality within the next five years. 

Other agency funding went to research teams at Rice University, Dartmouth College, Johns Hopkins University, the University of California San Francisco, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the University of Washington and to Cision Vision, a medical equipment manufacturer in Mountainview, California.

Tulane’s ‘revolutionary cancer-imaging scanner’

Solid tumors account for nearly 90% of adult cancers. So, often, for many of the two million people newly diagnosed with cancer each year, surgical tumor removal is the first option. Yet during surgery, it can be difficult to tell where a tumor ends and healthy tissue begins. 

Tulane’s new technology is designed to enhance the contrast between different tissues and rapidly create images at twice the resolution of conventional microscopes. Once complete, doctors will be able to use the MAGIC-SCAN project to scan a tumor mid-surgery, to determine within minutes whether cancerous tissue was left behind. This could both improve surgical efficacy and prevent repeated, invasive surgeries.

“The funding we announced today will help this tool visualize tumors right away instead of having to wait days or weeks and having to open the patient back up,” Biden said, calling it “a promising step.”

Currently, patients can wait days or even weeks to discover whether a tumor has been completely removed. MAGIC-SCAN sharply reduces that time. “Our goal is to get that down to 10 minutes, while the patient is still on the table,” said J. Quincy Brown, an associate professor of biomedical engineering at Tulane and the MAGIC-SCAN project’s lead researcher. 

The MAGIC-SCAN could play a major role within the larger effort to end cancer as we know it, Brown said. 

“If successful, our work would transform cancer surgery as we know it,” he said.

To Tulane President Michael A. Fitts, the most essential element of the university’s revolutionary technology was its potential for larger, societal effects. He called his university “a proud partner” in the Biden Cancer Moonshot. 

“This advancement will save lives,” Fitts said.

Turning pain into purpose

In 2016, former President Barack Obama announced the Cancer Moonshot and appointed then-Vice President Joe Biden to chair the initiative. In 2022, Biden kickstarted the next phase of the initiative by announcing an ambitious goal — to reduce the cancer death rate by half within 25 years and improve the lives of people with cancer and cancer survivors. 

Both the president and first lady have had lesions removed from their skin that were determined to be basal cell carcinoma, a common and easily treatable form of cancer. In 2015, their eldest son, Beau, died of brain cancer at age 46. 

“Of all the things that cancer steals from us – strength, mobility, comfort – time is the cruelest,” said Jill Biden. “When Joe and I lost our son to brain cancer, we decided to turn our pain into purpose.”

Joe Biden said that the Moonshot’s mission is not only personal but possible. 

Also, Biden said Tuesday, funding from the Cancer Moonshot initiative will help people living in Louisiana’s fenceline communities who face a disproportionate rate of cancer due to living next to industrial polluters. 

In Louisiana, research has shown that residents in predominantly-Black or impoverished neighborhoods are exposed to higher levels of toxic air pollution and experience higher cancer rates. More pounds of industrial toxic air pollution are released annually in Louisiana than in any other state, according to data from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

In its first two years, the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health invested more than $400 million to fast-track progress on the prevention, detection and treatment of cancer – through increased cancer screenings and the creation of tools to identify communities with the greatest cumulative environmental health risks. 

Tulane’s research, like others announced Tuesday, will help those already affected by cancer. 

Pollution reduction, to bring down cancer rates

The president’s announcement came on the heels of the EPA’s $19 million grant to Dillard University and United Way of Southeast Louisiana to help disadvantaged communities tackle environmental and climate justice challenges. The funding, announced last Thursday, will support projects to reduce pollution and strengthen community resilience to natural disaster within two parishes across Lake Pontchartrain, St. Tammany and Washington Parishes. 

Dillard’s grant is one of the first to be awarded through the Community Change Grants Program, an environmental-justice allocation made through the Inflation Reduction Act, which was signed into law two years ago this week. The program is the single largest investment in environmental and climate justice in American history.

With the $19 million grant, Dillard and United Way will improve transportation access, transform public buildings into community resilience hubs, and launch a new non-degree certificate program in clean energy and climate resilience. 

Projects to reduce air pollution could lower the incidence of cancer. 

For Brown, the $23 million award from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health is more than an investment in new technology – it’s a way to even the odds of cancer survival, in communities big and small. 

Born in a small farming community in Columbia, Louisiana, Brown is most impressed by the agency’s mission, passed down to its grantees, to develop technology that will work in rural or community settings, far away from major research centers. In other words, it must be fairly portable and affordable. “We can’t build a million-dollar device,” he said. 

Over the next five years, as Brown’s team develops the MAGIC-SCAN project, they will develop the new scanner and deploy it in two rural hospitals. 

This research, Brown hopes, will create a reality in which every American can undergo cancer surgery without worrying whether the tumor was fully removed.