On the 60th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy's famous moonshot speech, President Joe Biden on Monday is set out to lay out his new plan for a new "American Moonshot," an effort aimed at eradicating cancer "as we know it."
"This is a, all the way back '62, the moonshot was announced, we're gonna have a moonshot for cancer, for real. We're gonna cure cancer over time. I'm gonna lay out how we're gonna do that," Biden said Monday morning as he departed Washington for Boston, Massachusetts.
Ahead of Biden's remarks at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston, the White House outlined several policy announcements surrounding his cancer moonshot initiative.
Biden will announce that he intends to appoint Dr. Renee Wegrzyn to be the inaugural Director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), which the White House said will work to improve the U.S. government's ability to accelerate health and biomedical research.
President Joe Biden delivers remarks on his Bipartisan Infrastructure Law at the new Boston Logan Terminal in Boston, Sept. 12, 2022.
Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images
He will further announce executive orders with the goal of strengthening and diversifying domestic biomanufacturing capacity.
The "Cancer Cabinet," a new government entity created by the president in February, will also lay out what the White House said was its progress in eight areas towards its goals, which include lowering costs of prescription drugs for cancer patients thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act, launching a study on multi-cancer detection, and a Department of Defense program created with the goal of understanding the impact of service-related toxic exposure on the development of cancer in members of the military.
"Cancer not only afflicts Democrats and Republicans, but all Americans. When we come together as a nation around ideas that unite us -- like fighting cancer -- we can show the world that anything is possible," the White House wrote in a fact sheet prior to the event. "The President has long believed that America can be defined with one word: possibilities. And the American people demonstrate every day what is possible."
Earlier this year, Biden relaunched the federal government's cancer "moonshot" initiative, with the goal of cutting the death rate from cancer in half over the next quarter-century.
The initiative, which he originally launched as vice president, has been a personal effort for Biden, who lost his son Beau to glioblastoma, a rare and aggressive form of brain cancer, in 2015.
ABC News' Sarah Kolinovsky and Justin Gomez contributed to this report.
