WASHINGTON – Today, U.S. Senators Ben Cardin and Chris Van Hollen and Congressman Kweisi Mfume (all D-Md.) announced $20,900,000 for Johns Hopkins University (JHU) to advance surgical abilities to treat cancer. The funding from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health’s (ARPA-H) Precision Surgical Interventions Program will support the development of new surgical imaging tools that will allow surgeons to better distinguish between healthy tissue and cancer, enabling the removal of all cancer tissue in a single procedure.
JHU’s award is part of the Biden-Harris Administration’s Cancer Moonshot initiative, which aims to reduce the cancer death rate in the United States by at least half – preventing more than 4 million cancer deaths – by 2047, and improving the experience of people who are touched by cancer. As part of the Cancer Moonshot and with Congressional support, President Biden and Vice President Harris established ARPA-H to generate breakthroughs in preventing, detecting, and treating cancer and other diseases. In its first two years, ARPA-H has invested more than $400 million to fast-track progress in the fight against cancer. The members worked to secure $1.5 billion in funding for ARPA-H in fiscal year 2024 and are fighting to sustain this funding level in the final FY2025 bill.
“Maryland continues to be on the forefront of cancer research, changing the way we look at and treat cancer. Having long worked to advocate for federal support for cancer care and strong supporter of the Cancer Moonshot, I am proud to see Johns Hopkins University as part of this latest cohort working to transform cancer treatments. These federal dollars will contribute to the success of precision surgical procedures nationwide, making sure surgeons have all the tools they need to distinguish between healthy tissue and cancer in the operating room. It surely will save lives,” said Senator Cardin.
“The Cancer Moonshot is driving significant advances in the way we fight this disease. Johns Hopkins has long played a key role in the fight against cancer, and this funding will help the University create innovative new tools to ensure that the cancer surgeries of the future are more successful and less invasive. This major investment will save lives and bring us closer to our goal of ending cancer once and for all,” said Senator Van Hollen, who joined President Biden in 2022 to reignite the Cancer Moonshot and was an early proponent of ARPA-H.
“The fight against cancer is an overwhelmingly strenuous and lengthy test of body, mind, and spirit. This groundbreaking federal investment is a representation of Team Maryland’s Congressional Delegation’s concern for those affected by this debilitating and too often times fatal disease. Johns Hopkins University and its hospital and medical schools will continue to be exceptional partners in our shared mission of ending cancer as we know it,” said Congressman Kweisi Mfume.
“At Johns Hopkins, our shared belief in the power of research to improve lives and bring hope to millions of people informs everything we do every single day. This award provides significant resources to multidisciplinary teams working to ensure greater precision and success during highly complex cancer surgeries,” said Theodore DeWeese, M.D., Dean of the Medical Faculty and CEO, Johns Hopkins Medicine.
The funds will support JHU’s work on a novel non-contact, photoacoustic endoscope as well as a multi-cancer fluorescent contrast agent, which together will provide a more colorful view of the surgical field – without altering the surgeons’ workflow – equipping them to provide more effective tumor-removal surgeries. These imaging tools and strategies to be developed by JHU are aimed at improving the surgical precision of cancer operations, and in turn reducing rates of repeat surgery and instances of unintentional injury to other organs and nerves.
Surgical procedures are often the first treatment option for the two million Americans diagnosed with cancer each year. However, more than 10 percent of cancer surgeries leave cancer cells behind. Current surgical technologies do not allow doctors to easily and fully distinguish cancer cells from normal surrounding tissue in the operating room, leading to a need for unintentional patient injury and reoperations due to incomplete tumor removal, along with the pain, cost, and risk associated with both. Intraoperative visualization of nerves, blood vessels, lymph ducts, and glands is also challenging. Often, these critical structures have similar color and texture to surrounding tissue and are difficult to see under standard operating room lighting. They are also often buried under other soft tissue. In exposing such buried critical structures, surgeons risk damaging or destroying them.
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