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WASHINGTON -- President Biden announced actions Monday designed to accelerate the pace of cancer research and speed up development of new biopharmaceuticals.

Monday is the 60th anniversary of President Kennedy's speech committing to putting a man on the moon, Biden noted in a speech Monday afternoon at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston. "President Kennedy set a goal to win the space race against Russia and advance science and technology for all of humanity," he said. "When he set that goal, he established a national purpose that could rally the American people in a common cause. And he succeeded."

"Now in our time, on the 60th anniversary of his clarion call, we face another inflection point," Biden continued. "And together, we can choose to move forward with unity, hope, and optimism. I believe we can usher in the same unwillingness to postpone, the same national purpose that will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills to end cancer as we know it. And even cure cancers once and for all."

Biden's actions on Monday were related to his "" initiative to cut the cancer death rate by 50% over the next 25 years. On the research front, Biden , as the first director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H). Modeled in part after the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), ARPA-H is designed to improve the U.S. government's ability to speed health and biomedical research.

"Under Dr. Wegrzyn's leadership, ARPA-H will support programs and projects that undertake challenges ranging from the molecular to the societal, with the potential to transform entire areas of medicine and health in order to prevent, detect, and treat some of the most complex diseases such as Alzheimer's, diabetes, and cancer," the fact sheet noted.

Wegrzyn is currently a vice president of business development at Ginkgo Bioworks and head of innovation at Concentric by Ginkgo, where she works on applying synthetic biology to the treatment of infectious diseases through biomanufacturing, vaccine innovation, and biosurveillance of pathogens at scale. Prior to Ginkgo Bioworks, Wegrzyn was program manager in DARPA's Biological Technologies Office, where she used synthetic biology and gene editing to improve biosecurity and promote public health.

Also on Monday, Biden signed an executive order to establish the Biotechnology and Biomanufacturing Initiative "to ensure cutting-edge biotechnologies necessary to end cancer as we know it, and other innovations, will be developed and manufactured in America. This will save lives, create jobs at home, build stronger supply chains, and lower prices for American families even in times of global turbulence," the White House said in a . "This new initiative adds to President Biden's economic plan to bring back manufacturing jobs to the United States ... Our past off-shoring of critical industries, including biotechnology, presents a threat to our ability to access key materials, including the active pharmaceutical ingredients for life-saving medications."

On a call with reporters Sunday, a senior administration official noted that "the United States really has the best biotechnology innovators in the world. We really do lead in this area. But we risk falling behind, as we did in the semiconductor sector and then the advanced telecommunications sector, unless we translate biotechnology innovation into economic and societal benefits for all Americans."

The administration also highlighted in the fact sheet several other actions it had taken in this area, including making taxpayer-funded research results immediately available to the public free of charge. The White House is giving agencies more than 3 years to make this change, with a deadline of Dec. 31, 2025 for fully implementing the guidance. The new policy will affect more than 200,000 federally funded studies each year.

The White House also is expanding the , which it describes as "a national data infrastructure that encourages data-sharing to support cancer care for individual patients, and enables discovery of new treatments." For example, the Agriculture Department "is working with NIH to ensure that data on persistent poverty can be integrated with cancer surveillance, [and] the National Science Foundation recently announced a competition for a new $20 million biosciences data center to increase our understanding of living systems at small scales, which will produce new biotechnology designs to make products in agriculture, medicine and health, and materials."

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