ATLANTA • First lady Jill Biden’s voice broke Friday as she spoke to researchers fighting cancer at Emory University about the toll that the disease has taken on families like hers.

“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,” she said. “This work could change lives ... here in Georgia and around the world.”

Biden was at Emory Friday capping a two-day trip to Georgia with a visit to a research laboratory that received the debut grant from a new major research fund established by President Biden and Congress last year.

The university won the $24.8 million grant to study possible new ways to fight cancer and other diseases, using the immune system and mRNA technology.

The grant is from an initiative that President Joe Biden has dubbed the “Cancer Moonshot,” aiming to reduce U.S. cancer deaths by at least half within 25 years. It was also the first grant from a major new federal fund for health research projects called the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, or ARPA-H.