The Presidents proposed FY 2022 budget requests $6.5 billion to create the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) to be housed within NIH. The goal is to develop breakthroughs to prevent, detect, and treat diseases like Alzheimer’s, diabetes, and cancer.
In an article published in Science, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Director and Advisor to the President, Eric S. Lander, Ph.D., and NIH Director Francis S. Collins, MD., PhD along with other leaders, discussed how ARPA-H would focus on solving practical problems and drive them to the point of adoption.
ARPA-H would focus on limited projects to help prevent, treat or cure a range of diseases and provide healthcare access equity and quality to include:
- Cancer and Other Chronic Diseases –Produce vaccines that would prevent most cancers, develop non-intrusive wearable 24/7 monitors for blood pressure and blood sugar, and develop new approaches to accelerate the discovery of brain imaging and blood biomarkers
- Infectious Diseases—Be able to design, test, and approve a vaccine against any newly emerging human virus in 100 days and be able to administer vaccines through a skin patch or oral spray that would enable rapid massive vaccination campaigns
- Healthcare Access, Equity, and Quality—Develop platforms to reduce health disparities in maternal morbidity and mortality and platforms to promote better health outcomes
Go to https://science.sciencemag.org/lookup/doi//10.1126/science.abj8547 for the article Accelerating Biomedical Breakthroughs published in Science
Go to https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/ArPA-H-Concept-Paper.pdf, for the Advanced Research Project Agency for Health (ARPA-H) Concept Paper.