What if we could develop radiotherapy technology to enable one low-cost curative treatment effective for all cancers? 

The Problem

• Cancer is one of the leading causes of death in the United States, with more than 2 million new cases and 600,000 cancer-related deaths per year.  
• It is the leading cause of disease-related death in children, a heartbreaking reality that demands urgent action. 
• For patients and families, a cancer diagnosis often means months of grueling appointments, painful side effects, and crushing costs that can drain savings and derail lives. 
• Today, the effectiveness of radiotherapy (RT), a key pillar of cancer treatment, is limited, with major disparities in access and outcomes. Curative RT is only feasible for some localized tumors and is ineffective against metastatic diseases. 

The Solution

• The One Comprehensive Universal Radiotherapy for Everyone (1-CURE) program will develop a single, rapid, low-cost, and accessible radiotherapy approach to battle all types of cancer, including local, metastatic and RT-resistant cancers. 
• This bold strategy integrates two core innovations:  
  • multifunctional smart radiotherapy biomaterials (SRBs) that enable precise image-guided targeting and sustained delivery of immunoadjuvants, enabling therapeutic efficacy against not only localized tumors but also cancers that  have spread throughout the body or resisted traditional RT. 
  • an Abscopal Treatment Planning System (ATPS), which integrates SRBs and ultra-high dose rate (FLASH)-RT to optimize and reliably achieve effective abscopal responses across diverse cancer types. 
• If 1-CURE succeeds, it will transform cancer care from a prolonged battle into a single, decisive treatment, dramatically improving survival, lifting the financial burden from families across America and saving the U.S. healthcare system hundreds of billions of dollars every year. 

Only ARPA-H can...

• Pursue bold, high-risk, high-reward innovation to develop a curative radiotherapy approach effective across all cancers—local and metastatic—radically reshaping cancer care and transforming the course of human health.  
• Unite cross-disciplinary and industry expertise to seamlessly integrate physics, immunology, materials science, AI, engineering, clinical oncology, and advanced manufacturing, merging radiotherapy with immune-activating smart nanotechnology. 
• Serve as an "accelerator" for health innovation—using flexible funding, rapid contracting, and milestone-driven execution to compress what would normally take decades into just a few years, getting life-saving treatments to patients faster than ever before.