Durr among researchers to receive ARPA-H funding as part of Biden’s ‘Cancer Moonshot’
Nicholas Durr, associate professor of biomedical engineering, is among several Johns Hopkins researchers to have received new federal funding to advance tumor-removal surgeries for cancer patients.
The funding announced last week by the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) comes from a $150 million Cancer Moonshot initiative from the Biden Administration. Durr will partner with Dartmouth researchers to improve robotic cancer surgeries by visualizing critical structures that are often unintentionally injured. His laboratory will develop a novel laparoscope that can image fluorescence signals in three dimensions. His co-investigator, Ahmed Ghazi at the School of Medicine, will create anatomically realistic phantoms needed for testing that system.
Other Hopkins researchers involved in ARPA-H projects include Emad Boctor, Jin U. Kang, Peter Kazanzides, Mathias Unberath, and Russell H. Taylor from the Whiting School of Engineering and Jeff Jopling, Jeeun Kang, Raymond C. Koehler, Jacky Jennings, Lisa Jacobs, and Ashley Cimino-Mathews from the School of Medicine.
The Cancer Moonshot initiative, launched in 2016 and reignited under the Biden administration, aims to accelerate scientific discovery in cancer research and reduce the cancer death rate in the United States by at least half by 2047, preventing more than 4 million cancer deaths and improving the experience of people who are touched by cancer. ARPA-H was established in 2022 as part of the effort, to generate breakthroughs in the prevention, detection, and treatment of cancer and other diseases; in its first two years, it has invested more than $400 million to fast-track progress in the fight against cancer.