First Lady of the United States Jill Biden visited Emory University’s Health Sciences Research Building on Sept. 15 to highlight Curing the Uncurable via RNA-Encoded Immunogene Tuning (CUREIT), a new project funded through the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H).
Philip Santangelo, a professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Emory and the Georgia Institute of Technology, will lead the project.CUREIT aims to harness mRNA technology to train immune systems to deliver better health outcomes for people battling cancers and other diseases.
Santangelo said the Office of the First Lady of the United States contacted him about a week before the event about Biden potentially visiting Emory to discuss CUREIT.
“To be honest, I didn't think much of it because these things get canceled all the time,” Santangelo said. “They rarely really happened.”
An advanced team of White House personnel, including Secret Service agents, came to Emory on Sept. 10 to prepare Santangelo and his lab for the press conference.
Biden delivered a short speech on Santangelo’s work, ARPA-H and Cancer Moonshot following a tour of Santangelo’s lab.
“I’ve seen that there’s so much hope to be found and I see that hope here today,” Biden said. “As a mom who watched my son die of cancer, the one thing I never gave up on was hope.”
The ARPA-H project, including CUREIT, is part of the Cancer Moonshot initiative, which U.S. President Joe Biden reignited in February 2022 with the help of Associate Professor in the Department of Neurosurgery Edjah Nduom. Nduom’s research focuses on using the immune system to fight brain tumors.
Since its initial launch in 2016, the Cancer Moonshot initiative has focused on accelerating scientific breakthroughs in cancer treatments and was relaunched with the goal of reducing the death rate of cancer by at least 50% by 2047 and improving the experiences of people living with cancer.
At a press conference about the launch, Nduom said that this is “the most exciting moment” in the history of his field.
The Biden-Harris administration announced an investment of $2.5 billion for the establishment and development of the ARPA-H project last year, and Emory became the first institution to receive funding from ARPA-H last August. Another $240 million in funds will be allocated to future ARPA-H projects across the nation, empowering health care and biomedical breakthroughs that could transform society, Biden said during her speech.
Santangelo said that the entire experience was “surreal,” adding that he has not been this nervous since he was taking exams in college. He also said that Biden did not follow the event script and shook everyone’s hands at the event.
“We had a lab picture and that didn't even go the way it was supposed to,” Santangelo said. “It was very scripted as to what we were supposed to do. None of that happened because basically she decided to shake the hands of every person in the lab which was awesome, totally awesome, but not in the plan.”
Biden said the goal of the Cancer Moonshot initiative is to build a world where cancer is no longer a defining health challenge, emphasizing that projects like CUREIT “gives families the power to hold on to that hope just a little bit longer.”
“Through the Cancer Moonshot, we’re putting American innovation to work for patients and together we will make it so that the word cancer loses its power,” Biden said.
