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WASHINGTON — President Biden’s fledgling health agency, designed to accelerate under-funded research, just set its sights on one of the hottest areas of medicine — and one where the drug industry has a multibillion-dollar head start.

The White House announced Wednesday that the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health would bankroll a $24 million project by Emory University to build messenger RNA platforms to target “cancer and other diseases,” investing in the technology behind the U.S.’s most commonly used vaccines for Covid-19.

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The administration touted the news of CUREIT as the latest in Biden’s longtime mission to rein in cancer deaths, the Cancer Moonshot. But by using mRNA to treat cancer, ARPA-H is wading into a field that has advanced in fits and starts — and whose industry leaders have already spent multiples of the program’s entire budget into their own research. Moderna and BioNTech, massively profitable companies that have sold more than $80 billion worth of Covid-19 vaccines combined, have singled out oncology as the next big application for mRNA and invested accordingly.

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