Precision cancer therapy. Tissue regeneration. Engineering of immune cells. These are just a few of the innovative programs funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), a transformative initiative launched under the Biden administration in March 2022. The mission of ARPA-H is to accelerate better health outcomes for everyone by supporting the development of high-impact solutions to society's most challenging health problems.
It's a novel model that Joe Shonkwiler, MD, MBA, ARPA-H Chief Operating Officer, said is supported by a bottom-up decision-making approach. "We allow the problems to come up and then find solutions to those problems," he told an audience at a Tuesday Talk hosted by Cure in May 2024.
By finding and creating moonshot healthcare solutions, tracking metrics and measuring outcomes, ARPA-H hopes to accelerate the application of those solutions so they can have the greatest positive impact on the most people.
Broad Reach and a Broad Mission
ARPA-H has a hub-and-spoke structure with three hubs. The Dallas hub focuses on customer experience, while a hub in Cambridge, MA centers on catalyzing the investor community, and Washington, DC is home to the agency's stakeholder and operations hub. Spokes extend from each hub into all 50 states. Cure is a spoke for both the ARPHA Investor Catalyst Hub and its Customer Experience Hub.
Programmatically, ARPA-H is organized into four offices:
Health Science Futures to apply new scientific discoveries.
Resilient Systems to create interoperative healthcare systems that can withstand pandemics and other crises.
Proactive Health to keep people from becoming patients in the first place.
Scalable Solutions to reach the broadest number of people as quickly as possible.
Among these offices are specific programs, with each led by a program manager. Examples include DIGIHEALS to fortify the US digital health infrastructure against cyberattacks; NITRO to develop innovative tissue regeneration solutions for osteoarthritis; BREATHE to promote better indoor air quality; and UPGRADE to enable hospitals to autonomously protect themselves and their patients from cyber threats.
Following the launch of the White House Initiative on Women's Health Research in November 2023, ARPA-H announced it is seeking requests for solutions for six women's health topics, ranging from home healthcare and chronic pain to ovarian health and brain health.
"These are problems that have been identified through input from a variety of stakeholder groups," Shonkwiler said. "It's been amazing to see the response from the community about the opportunity to highlight this area, and $100 million have been allocated to do this."
Measuring Success
Key to the mission of ARPA-H is tracking metrics and outcomes. "We're designed to be as much like a private sector enterprise as you can be within the public sector. We focus on measuring what we're doing, getting to outcomes and getting to impact," Shonkwiler noted.
He highlighted the high-contact program management model of ARPA-H, which uses flexible contracting vehicles. The agency's program managers track metrics monthly, quarterly and yearly to see how well programs are performing.
"In some cases, we have to pivot with our funds," said Shonkwiler. "Things may work, things may not work. It's as much about identifying what's working as what's not working, and then really homing in on the stuff that's working."
One contract example is the $48.3 million ARPA-H awarded in February 2024 to Every Cure. The funding supports the nonprofit organization's artificial intelligence platform to accelerate the repurposing of existing drugs for currently untreated diseases. Every Cure was also one of five winners of the Cure Xchange Challenge: Health AI for Good. "It's such a compelling story. We do focus on things that have application to multiple disease areas and can have a huge, broad impact," explained Shonkwiler.
How to Apply for ARPA-H Funding
Shonkwiler encourages interested innovators to visit the ARPA-H website for more information and to learn about existing programs and their managers. The agency is always looking for more program managers, and Shonkwiler encourages interested individuals to apply.
He concluded, "We're looking for world-changing folks who have world-changing ideas and can take on high-contact program management themselves. That's really where a lot of the activity is."