First Lady Pool Reports of September 15, 2023

Pool Report #1 - FLOTUS at Emory

Pool report #1 from First Lady Jill Biden's visit to Emory University in Atlanta Friday, part of her two-day visit to Georgia.

This is Ariel Hart, your print pooler for the Emory visit. Greetings on a cloudy Atlanta day.

FLOTUS toured the lab of Professor Philip Santangelo, a professor of biomedical engineering at Emory University, who won the first grant ever issued by the new agency ARPA-H, the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health. (A takeoff on DARPA.) The Bidens are calling the grant part of the president's Cancer Moonshot. Santangelo's lab won the grant and will do the work in partnership with other labs at Emory, Yale University and the University of Georgia; as well as the company Transimmune.

Some background on this grant and the lab:
https://news.emory.edu/stories/2023/08/hs_arpa-h-funding-announcement_23-08-2023/story.html
https://www.ajc.com/news/health-news/emory-gets-federal-money-to-research-mrna-immunity-for-cancer/BDL7K7VK6VECTMKS4RXXGQYE5I/

FLOTUS entered the Santangelo lab at 10:25 am accompanied by ARPA-H director Renee Wegrzyn, Emory University President Greg Fenves, and others. She wished the lab leaders "good morning" and said "I'm Jill. Biden" with a pause after her first name.

FLOTUS was friendly. The atmosphere was a bit stiff. Santangelo is a lively communicator. In a corner of the room out of camera shot, more than a dozen lab researchers were waiting, dressed in sharp business attire and dresses under white lab coats. Santangelo wore a white lab coat also, suit pants and shiny black formal shoes below. FLOTUS was in a form-fitting short-sleeved print dress with purple flowers, looked like dahlias, on a white background, and high heels.

First FLOTUS, Santangelo, Santangelo's postdoctoral fellow José Assumpção, and the others stood flanking an automated liquid handler, essentially a robot. The robot handles liquids – like a lab technician would do using pipettes, but many more at a time and much faster – to screen molecules used in experiments, looking for RNA candidates. The grant will allow the purchase of another of the machines, which cost in the six figures. It was an Eppendorf epMotion 5075.

Emory President Fenves:
"the First Lady and the President have been strong advocates for patients and we are so pleased that you and President Biden have launched the Cancer Moonshot to fight this disease that has afflicted nearly every American family. And thanks to the new agency, ARPA-H, and the groundbreaking work that they will enable us to be able to do.
"We are just glad that Emory University is in this fight to end cancer."

Santangelo:
"In general, what we really zeroed in on is one of the commonalities among many, many diseases that afflict Americans is immune dysregulation. This is important in cancer and autoimmune disease and many diseases. So we wanted to basically develop RNA drugs that would allow us to tune the immune system. And so that basically gives us the ability to target lots of different diseases. But there is a significant emphasis on cancer in this effort."
"For cancer in particular, we really want to do two things. One is we want to supercharge those cells to basically attack tumor cells. We need to get rid of them, plain and simple. The second thing though, is that tumors are kind of sneaky. They actually are very powerful in their ability to turn off the immune system. So we wouldn't want to turn it on and then have the cells basically, you know, throw a blanket over our therapy. … So there's a significant emphasis on basically preventing those cells from affecting our, basically, our therapy. Making our therapy resistant to what those cells are actually doing."

FLOTUS asked where the lab gets the cells from: "Do you get them from animals, people, cadavers?"
Santangelo said a lot of their samples were propagated cell lines, but they have shown they can use cells from humans (as well as other species).

Wegrzyn asked Santangelo what ARPA-H had allowed him to do that he couldn't do otherwise.
Santangelo: "Everything. I mean, I was talking actually earlier, some folks were asking me about, 'why are these high risk, high reward programs really important?' … They greatly influence our ability to take risks. So a lot of what we proposed probably wouldn't be funded through other agencies. Because we're trying to combine a lot of different ideas, a lot of new technologies that, honestly, some will work, some may not work."

"So in terms of the next three years, what we're proposing to do is essentially, design these new tools for cancer - for various cancers - for autoimmune disease actually, and also for infectious disease. Long COVID being one of the targets of this effort. So it's a big, big area. And the whole idea is that by the end of three years, we have a platform: a) that we're confident in that we've learned a whole lot about; and hopefully also winners. So we need winners. Winners that we can then take in the clinic."

They moved to a second machine, a microfluidic mixer, which they use to mix RNA and mRNA molecules with lipids.

Loren Sasser, the laboratory's manager, set up an experiment in the mixer and had FLOTUS push the green start button.

FLOTUS: "I'm hoping in the future that chemotherapy will be such a thing of the past."
Santangelo: "I really hope so too. That really very much part of exactly what we're trying to do."

Santangelo: "we're also training students, and we're training postdocs, and we're training the next generation of scientists. So, I mean, I think that's another really important part. Yes, we're all going to go crazy over the next three years, doing a lot of work, but I would say at the same time, there's a lot of training."

At that, FLOTUS had the crowd of postdocs, PhD students and lab employees come out of the corner for photos together. Speaking of them, Jill Biden said, "This is our future right here."

They left the lab about 10:43 am or so.

They proceeded to a press conference that was open press.

Note: PRIOR TO THE FLOTUS LAB VISIT Santangelo chatted with press.
Asked about the "high-risk, high-reward" work that ARPA-H grants will fund, Santangelo said: "It's life altering. I mean, game changing. I mean, being involved in these kinds of programs. I cannot tell you how excited we are, because you get to really take risks. And I don't mean risks with people obviously, but risks scientifically, intellectually. You can think of if you can think of it and we can make it which we make a lot of molecules in the lab, then we can go ahead and give that a shot. And that's something you don't get to do. I mean, in a lot of other programs, it's difficult to do that you really have to be much further along. It has to be I don't want to say incremental, but the jumps that you're making (in other programs) are smaller than the leaps that we have to make here."

BACKGROUND:

Of note: Both Jill Biden and her husband have recently had surgery to remove a basal cell carcinoma, a common type of skin cancer. The president's son, Beau, died of brain cancer at age 46.

From a 9/12/22 White House press release:
"President Biden created ARPA-H in March 2022 to push the limits of U.S. biomedical and health research and innovation. ARPA-H will embrace proven models of tapping talent and expertise from across industry, academia, and government to bring new ideas and approaches, as well as the ability to marshal resources through public-private partnerships. Equity will be important to ARPA-H's mission, which will ensure all projects consider equity in their design, support impactful breakthroughs, expand health care access, and improve access for all patients regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability, and income level."

• Background provided by White House:

Background | First Lady Jill Biden Visit to Atlanta, Georgia Friday 9/15
Today, Friday, September 15st, as part of the Biden Cancer Moonshot, the First Lady will visit Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia to highlight the launch of the first project funded through the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), which aims to use mRNA technology to train immune systems to fight cancer and other diseases more effectively.
Following this visit, the First Lady will give remarks at the sixth annual 50 Most Influential Latinos Event hosted by the Georgia Hispanic Chamber of Commerce (GHCC) to celebrate the start of Hispanic Heritage Month.

Visit to Emory University
At 10:00 AM, as part of the Biden Cancer Moonshot, the First Lady will visit Emory University to highlight the launch of the first project funded through the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H). The project, called "Curing the Uncurable via RNA-Encoded Immunogene Tuning (CUREIT)," will be led by a team at Emory University and aims to use mRNA technology to train immune systems to fight cancer and other diseases more effectively.

As part of his Unity Agenda last year, President Biden called on Congress to establish and fund ARPA-H to drive breakthroughs in cancer and other diseases. He has since delivered results—working with Congress on a bipartisan basis to invest $2.5 billion in ARPA-H.

In July, the President announced ARPA-H's first program targeting cancer, with a goal of developing novel technologies that enable surgeons to remove cancerous tumors with more precision and accuracy, resulting in better health outcomes for Americans facing cancer. In August, the President announced the first project funded through ARPA-H: the CUREIT project, led by researchers at Emory University.

Earlier this week, the First Lady joined President Biden for a convening of his Cancer Cabinet where he announced a slate of new actions the Biden-Harris Administration, non-profit organizations, companies, and others are taking to deliver on the Biden Cancer Moonshot's mission to end cancer as we know it. That includes $240 million in additional ARPA-H investments this year to accelerate new ways to prevent, detect, treat, and survive cancer.

Tour of the Santangelo Lab at Emory University's Health Sciences Research Building II

The First Lady will be joined by the following individuals on the tour of Santangelo Lab:

• Dr. Renee Wegrzyn, Director of ARPA-H
• Dr. Greg Fenves, President of Emory University
• Dr. Phil Santangelo, Principal Investigator of the CUREIT Project, Emory University

During the tour, the First Lady will follow the journey of developing mRNA drugs to "tune" the immune system to combat a variety of diseases, especially cancer. At each stop, the First Lady, Dr. Renee Wegrzyn, and Dr. Greg Fenves will be briefed on how Dr. Phil Santangelo's lab team is working to develop new RNA drugs to help immune systems combat a variety of diseases, including cancer.

TOUR STOP 1 – CUREIT Project
The First Lady, Dr. Renee Wegrzyn, and Dr. Greg Fenves will receive a briefing about an automated liquid handler, an instrument the Santangelo Lab researchers are using to assess the best combinations of drug components that, when mixed together, can help "tune" immune cells to create a desired response.
The briefing will be led by:

• Dr. Phil Santangelo, Principal Investigator, CUREIT Project
• Jose Assumpcao, Immunologist and Researcher in the Santangelo Lab, Emory University

TOUR STOP 2 – CUREIT Project
The First Lady, Dr. Renee Wegrzyn, and Dr. Greg Fenves will observe a microfluidic based formulator, an instrument with which the Santangelo Lab researchers mix drug components and condense them into nanoparticles to be used to adjust the immune responses for different diseases, such as cancer.
The briefing will be led by:

• Dr. Phil Santangelo, Principal Investigator, CUREIT Project
• Loren Sasser, Laboratory Manager in the Santangelo Lab, Emory University

Following the tour, the First Lady will deliver remarks.
Remarks Program:

• First Lady Jill Biden
• Dr. Renee Wegrzyn, ARPA-H Director
• Dr. Greg Fenves, President of Emory University

Background on the Cancer Moonshot:

As Vice President, in 2016, Joe Biden led the Cancer Moonshot with the mission to accelerate the rate of progress against cancer. The cancer advocacy, patient, research, and health care communities responded with tremendous energy and ingenuity. In February 2022, President Biden and Dr. Biden reignited the Cancer Moonshot and set a new national goal: if we work together, we can cut the death rate from cancer by at least 50 percent over the next 25 years, and improve the experience of people and their families living with and surviving cancer.

Background on Dr. Biden's Cancer Advocacy Efforts:
The First Lady has been a tireless champion of the Cancer Moonshot, traveling the country and the world to hear from cancer patients and their families, as well as those who support them. She has focused on the importance of early detection and improving the experience of patients, families, and caregivers.
Since the start of the Biden Administration, the First Lady has participated in more than 40 Cancer Moonshot engagements and has visited 16 cities in almost a dozen states.

Dr. Biden's advocacy for cancer education and prevention began in 1993, when four of her friends were diagnosed with breast cancer. Following that year, she launched the Biden Breast Health Initiative to educate Delaware high school girls about the importance of cancer prevention. In 2015, after Dr. Biden and then-Vice President Joe Biden lost their son Beau to brain cancer, they helped push for a national commitment to ending cancer as we know it through the White House Cancer Moonshot. Following the Obama-Biden Administration, then-former Vice President Biden and Dr. Biden continued their cancer work through the Biden Cancer Initiative.

Georgia Hispanic Chamber of Commerce 50 Most Influential Latinos of Georgia

At 11:45 AM, the First Lady will join the Georgia Hispanic Chamber of Commerce (GHCC) to kick-off Hispanic Heritage Month and deliver remarks at GHCC's sixth annual 50 Most Influential Latinos Event. The event will celebrate and recognize 50 Latino trailblazers and community leaders who have shaped various industries, empowered communities, and embraced their cultural heritage.

Background on Georgia Hispanic Chamber of Commerce:
Established in 1984, the Georgia Hispanic Chamber of Commerce (GHCC) aims to promote the domestic and international economic development of Hispanic businesses and individuals, and to serve as a link between non-Hispanic entities and the Hispanic market. Its primary focus is on business formation, business growth, and civic and leadership development and engagement. It serves entrepreneurs and business owners through consultations, workshops, and seminars, and partners with organizations such as the Small Business Development Center to bring quality programming to the Hispanic business community. With over 1,000 members, the GHCC is one of the largest Hispanic Chambers in the United States.

Pool report #2 for FLOTUS at Emory.

Additional notes:

FLOTUS' remarks to an audience at Emory University after her tour of the Santangelo lab were open press, and the WSB radio pooler can be contacted for his sound (contacts listed below).
However here are some excerpts from her remarks to the audience.

Jill Biden:
"..the President announced ARPA-H will soon award $250 million more for cancer related research."
"As I've traveled the country and the world I've seen innovative programs that are making progress. I've seen what's possible when we invest in cutting edge research. And I've seen that there's so much hope to be found. And I see that hope here today. As a mom who watched my son die of cancer the one thing I never gave up on was hope. As a mother you can't. This work gives families the power to hold on to that hope just a little bit longer. Because this work could change lives. Your work. It's your work that can change lives. Here in Georgia, and around the world. Through the Cancer Moonshot, we're putting American innovation to work for patients. And together, we will make it so the word cancer loses its power. So fewer families know the pain of losing a loved one to this disease. It's ambitious, yes, but it's within our reach. And we are doing it with the urgency of now. For Joe and for me this is the mission of our lives. And we are ready and we are proud to work beside you."
(She briefly choked up at "As a mother you can't.")

From interviews after the remarks to the audience:

Dr. Ravi Thadhani, executive vice president for health affairs at Emory University:
"We're very respectful for the funding we get from the NIH," Thadhani said. The mission of funding risk like DARPA or ARPA-H is different: "It's focused on risk. And that's the difference."
Will be taking more advantage of ARPA-H opportunities: "We have groundbreaking research and innovative investigators and this is just the first of a few that are to come."
Cost to consumer of eventual therapies from the grant will be lower than if industry funded: "This is academically based. With therapies that have a chance to change cancer at a much lower cost than what otherwise industry would charge."

Emory University president Greg Fenves:
"This is very exciting that we're able to shine a light on tremendous research that's going to benefit of cancer patients or patients with other diseases."
"The core of our mission is education and having our students and our young faculty or postdocs do this research -- we're not just solving today's problems we're training them to solve tomorrow's problems."

Also seated in the audience were Santangelo's collaborators on the grant:
Dr. Richard Edelson, professor of dermatology at the Yale School of Medicine and founder of the company Transimmune
Jeff Hogan, professor of infectious diseases at the University of Georgia
Eric Lafontaine, professor of infectious diseases at the University of Georgia

Contacts for the poolers for the tour:

Radio
Jonathan O'Brien, WSB Radio
[email redacted by the APP]
[phone redacted by the APP]

TV
WSB-TV
[email redacted by the APP]
[phone redacted by the APP]

Photog
Arvin Temkar, Atlanta Journal-Constitution
[email redacted by the APP]
[phone redacted by the APP]