President Joe Biden visited Tulane University on Tuesday and announced $150 million in federal funding for eight cancer research teams across the country.
During a speech on campus, he said the New Orleans university will receive up to $23 million in funding to research and develop a new type of scanner for use during tumor removal surgeries.
The scanner will help doctors determine whether cancer tissue was left behind after a tumors’ removal and reduce lengthy post-op wait times for tests that today’s patients deal with, Biden said.
“That anxiety waiting and the unknown is excruciating,” Biden said. “But today we’re a step closer to relieving that burden on patients and families.”
The scanner is called the Machine-learning Assisted Gigantic Image Cancer margin SCANner or “MAGIC-SCAN” for short. Tulane said it will be able to detect cancer cells "within minutes," which would make it one of the world's fastest high-resolution tissue scanners.
“Currently, it can take days to weeks before a surgeon knows whether all the tumor has been removed, and our goal is to get that down to 10 minutes, while the patient is still on the table,” said J. Quincy Brown, associate professor of biomedical engineering at Tulane, in a release. “If successful, our work would transform cancer surgery as we know it."
Brown said it will take five years to build a prototype.
The school’s new grant is part of Biden's "cancer moonshot" initiative, which Biden started in 2016 when he was vice president, and revived in 2022. The program aims to help patients navigate the health care system and reduce the cancer death rate in the United States by at least half over 25 years.
Biden’s New Orleans visit comes three weeks after the president ended his reelection bid and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris as the nominee amid concerns about his age and fitness following a shaky debate performance.
"The funding we announce today will help get these tools in the operating room to visualize tumors right away instead of having to wait days and weeks and maybe reopening the patient to go back in," Biden said.
WWNO's Athina Morris contributed to this report.
