What We Fund
Focus Areas
The Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) funds research across focus areas that are disease agnostic, broad by design, and intersect to foster the creativity and big thinking needed for next-generation innovation. Each focus area is managed by an ARPA-H Mission Office responsible for building research programs and soliciting innovative solutions that align with the agency’s mission. Learn more about the type of priority research ARPA-H funds below.
FOCUS AREA
Health Science Futures:
Predict and control all of biology
Research focused on transforming healthcare from trial-and-error into rational, predictive engineering across biological scales. If your idea advances our ability to read, predict, write, or execute biology with engineering-grade precision — from molecular measurement to autonomous therapeutic systems — it belongs in Health Science Futures.
FOCUS AREA
Proactive Health:
Preventing People from getting sick
Research focused on increasing wellbeing, preventing disease, enabling earlier detection, and delaying disease progression. If your idea shifts the paradigm of healthcare from restoring health after illness to preserving and optimizing health throughout life, it belongs in Proactive Health.
FOCUS AREA
Scalable Solutions:
Unlock the scaling of breakthrough health technologies
Research that accelerates breakthroughs to market by stripping friction from medicine, dismantling barriers that keep innovative capabilities from reaching broad populations, and building the health data infrastructure to make personalized biology routine. If your idea lays the tracks for scalable delivery of biotech and medicine’s most important innovations, it belongs in Scalable Solutions.
What We Fund
Topics
We fund research across all topics of human health and biotechnology including, but not limited to, the following areas:
- Compressing timelines for biotechnology advancement and adoption
- Slowing or reversing aging
- Defeating devastating diseases with cutting-edge therapeutics
- Boosting domestic biomanufacturing
- Accelerating artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, and computational biology for healthcare
- Building platforms that multiply impact
- Expanding rural healthcare access
We seek proposals that:
- Advance care models
- Offer new business solutions
- Would result in substantial technical innovation
General Criteria
We focus exclusively on the most difficult health challenges that cannot be solved through traditional government or industry funding. This means we only accept ideas that are:
- Breakthrough-enabling: Research must target significant, unmet health needs.
- High-risk, high-impact: We take calculated, strategic bets on ideas that, if successful, will result in revolutionary breakthroughs.
- Highly complex: Solutions often require cross-sector coordination and multidisciplinary collaborative approaches.
Specific requirements and evaluation criteria are detailed in each solicitation posting, accessible from the open funding opportunities page.
What We Don't Fund
Incremental research ideas that can be readily accomplished through other government or industry funding.
We exclude proposals that:
- Only offer incremental advances
- Focus on technology already at the clinical trial stage
- Are limited to education and training efforts
- Solely address physical infrastructure
FAQs
An office within ARPA-H that focuses on specific areas of health innovation or research and development that’s aligned to the agency’s mission. Mission offices strategically organize, fund, and accelerate high-risk, high-impact health research that falls outside traditional, incremental biomedical approaches. Each office focuses on broad, transformative technologies across diseases rather than singular conditions.
The Award Directory tracks all ARPA-H research and development awards.
Start by learning about ARPA-H and reviewing the broad requirements that define the type of research ARPA-H funds (i.e., revolutionary, not evolutionary ideas).
Next, look at the opportunities listed on the Open Funding Opportunity page. Each opportunity links to detailed information and requirements and offers different ways to learn more or to submit abstracts for general feedback.
Start by reviewing the program and initiative openings listed on the Open Funding Opportunity page to see if your solution fits one of our open solicitations. If it does not, then read the information provided in the Mission Office ISOs: Know Before Applying guide. This guide will help you determine if your idea aligns with one of the Mission Office’s general funding solicitations.
APPLY NOW
Have a bold idea that will change the course of human health? Apply to an open funding opportunity.