Aug. 23 (UPI) — The Biden administration launched a $24 million “moonshot” research initiative Wednesday to train mRNA to fight cancer, autoimmune disorders and infectious diseases.
The new Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health program, called “Curing the Incurable via RNA-Encoded Immunogene Tuning” or CUREIT, is part of President Joe Biden’s Unity Agenda and Cancer Moonshot program. It will be led by a team at Emory University in Georgia, the White House announced.
“A skilled team at Emory University in Atlanta will work to adapt these technologies to turn more cancers into curable diseases,” Biden said in a statement. “This is a bold endeavor that has the potential to transform the fight against cancer and other difficult diagnoses.”
The Biden Cancer Moonshot program, which is compared to the United States’ moon-landing program of the 1960s, seeks to accelerate scientific research, data and treatments “to end cancer as we know it.”
In July, the White House announced the program would fund the first advanced research projects to allow surgeons to remove cancerous tumors with more precision and accuracy.
CUREIT, which is the first award from the ARPA-H Open Broad Agency Announcement, will harness mRNA platforms to train the immune system to fight cancer and other diseases.
“In my Unity Agenda I announced in my State of the Union address last year, I called on Congress to establish and fund the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health,” Biden said Wednesday. “Members on both sides of the aisle answered by call, and already, ARPH-H is meeting its mission to create breakthroughs in how to prevent, detect and treat cancer and other diseases.”
Biden says mRNA technology, which was used to develop COVID-19 vaccines, has already “saved millions of lives around the world.”
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