Sprint for Women’s Health
The ARPA-H Sprint for Women’s Health addresses critical unmet challenges in women’s health and champions transformative innovations.
Breakthrough innovations to transform women’s health
The Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) supports biomedical and health breakthroughs to accelerate better health outcomes for everyone. Through our Sprint for Women’s Health, we are championing transformative innovations and answering critical unmet challenges in women’s health across all demographics, geographies, and socioeconomic statuses.
This initiative seeks to galvanize the innovator, investor, researcher, and patient advocate communities around solving specific problems, including brain, reproductive, and cardiovascular health. Two funding tracks are fostering transformative research & development (R&D) efforts—from “Spark” (early-stage research) to “Launchpad” (later-stage development)—to greatly improve women’s health outcomes.
Women’s Health Topics
Women’s Health Topic 01
Women’s Health at Home
What if women were empowered to address their healthcare needs through diagnostics and treatments at home across all ages and stages of life?
Women’s Health Topic 01
Women’s Health at Home
ARPA-H is working to speed up the development of innovative and impactful at-home use technologies to diagnose and treat women’s health needs. Novel technologies should empower women—no matter their age, geography, or life stage—to take control of their health and to detect and treat disease early, in the privacy of their own home.
Shirley Bergin
Women’s Health Topic 02
Prioritizing Ovarian Health
What if prioritizing ovarian health throughout a woman’s life could actively prevent or delay the onset of a diverse array of acute and chronic conditions and diseases associated with peri-menopause and menopause?
Women’s Health Topic 02
Prioritizing Ovarian Health
ARPA-H is working to develop revolutionary solutions that promote ovarian health and preserve endocrine function past mid-life. The goal is to enhance women’s health over the life span by addressing both short- and long-term health effects tied to menopause and ovarian aging. This initiative is exploring novel treatments, interventions, and research that prioritize conservation of ovarian function and maintaining or restoring hormone levels. Through this work, we are aiming to prevent and mitigate diseases and conditions associated with aging, ensuring a healthier and extended quality of life.
Jessica Green, Ph. D.
Women’s Health Topic 03
ARTEMIS: Modeling Sex Differences
What if we could revolutionize female-specific research models to ensure equitable and effective treatments?
Women’s Health Topic 03
ARTEMIS: Modeling Sex Differences
ARPA-H is working to speed up the development of innovative female-specific research models that account for sex differences in health and disease. Past research models have predominantly relied on male animals, tissues, and cells, which has sometimes led to flawed results. We are now aiming for a transformative leap forward in how women’s health issues are modeled, studied, and addressed. While developing women-specific models, the platform technology should adequately represent female biology and physiology, including the reproductive system, hormonal fluctuations, and genetic and epigenetic differences between males and females.
Daria Fedyukina, Ph.D.
Women’s Health Topic 04
Women's Brain Health
What if targeting our brain’s lymphatic system improved outcomes for women at risk for neurological and neurogenerative diseases?
Women’s Health Topic 04
Women's Brain Health
ARPA-H is working to speed up neurodegenerative disease research by investing in technologies focused on research, diagnosis, treatment, and care of the brain’s lymphatic and glymphatic system. This system helps filter fluid and clear waste from a person’s brain and central nervous system. The interdisciplinary group of researchers, clinicians, and technology experts we have brought together are focused on the onset, phenotype, and presentation of related brain diseases in women.
Kimberley Steele, M.D., Ph.D.
Women’s Health Topic 05
Measurements of Chronic Pain
What if women’s pain were taken seriously?
Women’s Health Topic 05
Measurements of Chronic Pain
ARPA-H is developing methods to objectively, quantitatively, and longitudinally measure pain across a variety of chronic conditions. These methods seek to enable clinicians to evaluate disease evolution and to determine how well a woman’s course of treatment is addressing their pain. The pain measurement methods aim to be simple, inexpensive, and deployable in a range of settings. Accurate identification of the location of the pain generator and accurately distinguishing between different pain types are key parts of this work.
Ileana Hancu, Ph.D.
Women’s Health Topic 06
Revolutionary Breakthroughs
What if we could shatter the glass ceiling of women’s health research with innovations so bold, they rewrite the rules of the game?
Women’s Health Topic 06
Revolutionary Breakthroughs
ARPA-H is working to revolutionize methods for data generation, analysis, and application in women’s health. This topic is advancing cutting-edge research, novel technologies, business models to sustain investment, and interdisciplinary approaches to forge strategies that address women’s health challenges. This topic is dedicated to reshaping women’s health research into a more comprehensive and forward-thinking endeavor, ensuring significant improvements in global health outcomes. If successful, these concepts will change the conversation and the practice of how we engage women’s health day-to-day.
Shirley Bergin
Sprint by the numbers
More than 1700 submissions were received from over 30 countries.
Research teams from around the country and the globe are from universities, small businesses, and industry.
Awarded projects span many technological areas.
Awarded projects include conditions that uniquely and disproportionally affect women.
$113M
invested to address health conditions uniquely or disproportionately impacting women
Over 70% of projects are woman-led
6
months from concept to award
9 projects awarded to small businesses or startups
30%
have never received government funding before
39% of projects awarded to colleges or universities
ARPA-H is pleased to announce the following Sprint for Women’s Health awardees.
Topic 1: Women's Health at Home
Revolutionizing At-Home Preeclampsia Detection
What if we could reliably predict preeclampsia in pregnant women with an at-home test?
Preeclampsia (PE) complicates 5-7% of pregnancies and is a major cause of maternal and neonatal morbidity and mortality. Accurate diagnosis remains a key challenge. We have some molecular tests for this condition, but they rely on expensive, blood-based platforms – systems that require trained laboratory technologists and hospital-based laboratories. Our goal is to develop and validate a point-of-care test that can be readily used by mothers at home for early detection of PE.
Topic 1: Women's Health at Home
Paradigm Shift for Early At-Home HPV Management
What if we could offer a simple and inexpensive home-based HPV cure for women worldwide?
Topic 1: Women's Health at Home
Fast and Affordable Home STI/UTI Test
What if women of any age could diagnose multiple infections by one inexpensive test at home?
Topic 1: Women's Health at Home
At-Home Treatment to Stop Preterm Labor
What if we could eradicate preterm delivery with a simple labor-halting drug administered at home?
We aim to develop an at-home treatment for preterm labor that involves an antibody-drug conjugate or small-molecule drug conjugate that displays selective delivery of drugs to the uterus to inhibit uterine contractions and reduce the side-effect profiles for current off-label medications.
Topic 1: Women's Health at Home
Home-Based Safe & Intelligent Labor Inductions
What if we could conduct remote maternal and fetal monitoring to enable safe and comfortable labor induction at home?
We aim to develop a wireless sensor system that facilitates remote monitoring of maternal and fetal biometrics to enable data-driven decision-making. In the United States, this solution has the potential to reduce nearly $800 million in insurance costs yearly. Our goal is to enhance the quality of outpatient labor induction for a growing number of high-risk pregnancies.
Topic 2: Prioritizing Ovarian Health
Extend Ovarian Function & Lifespan
What if one drug could delay menopause to promote longevity and overall health?
Topic 2: Prioritizing Ovarian Health
Ovarian Implants to Prevent Disease in Menopause
What if women’s long-term health could be protected by eliminating the adverse effects of menopause?
Topic 3: ARTEMIS: Modeling Sex Differences
Bioengineered Ex Utero Drug Testing Model
What if we definitively knew which medications were safe during pregnancy without needing to test these drugs?
Topic 4: Women's Brain Health
Near-Infrared Glymphatic Health Tracker (NIGHT) Study
What if women could achieve restorative sleep and mitigation of neurodegenerative diseases?
Topic 4: Women's Brain Health
Female Lymphatic GPCR Therapeutics (FLyGT) for Migraine Treatment
What if we could design a personalized treatment to reduce women’s debilitating migraines?
Topic 4: Women's Brain Health
MAGNifying Glymphatics in Women’s Brains
What if we could identify neurophysiological sex disparity rationale in cognitive decline?
Topic 4: Women's Brain Health
Nano-drug Delivery Devices (NANO-3D) for Ischemic Stroke
What if we could improve stroke outcomes for women with simple non-invasive therapies?
Topic 4: Women's Brain Health
Evaluate Brain Disorders in Women via Aquaporin Activity
What if we could use non-invasive imaging to understand how biological sex affects the health of women's brains?
Glymphatic function is believed to play a key role in brain disorders which profoundly affect women’s health, yet glymphatic function is not currently assessed clinically. We propose validation and commercialization of a noninvasive MRI metric of glymphatic function that has the potential to revolutionize how the numerous neurological disorders which are more prevalent in women can be understood, assessed clinically, and approached therapeutically.
Topic 4: Women's Brain Health
Clear Brain Toxins in Women with Focused Ultrasound
What if we could treat neurodegenerative disorders and age-related cognitive decline in women by enhancing brain lymphatic flow with just a single injection and ultrasound?
Topic 5: Measurements of Chronic Pain
Decoding Pain Through a Blood Test
What if a blood-based assay could identify and quantify endometriosis pain levels informing treatment?
Topic 5: Measurements of Chronic Pain
Multi-Modal Smart Band-Aid for AI Pain Quantification
What if women's pain could be quantitatively assessed in real time with wearable sensors?
Topic 5: Measurements of Chronic Pain
Wearable Sweat Sensing System for Chronic Pain
What if a sweat measurement sensed and tracked women's pain levels over time?
Topic 5: Measurements of Chronic Pain
Novel Physiologic Measure of Chronic Pain in Women
What if women's eyes provided a window into their pain?
This project will work to develop a physiologic biomarker that enables an objective characterization of pain type and intensity. When fully developed, this technology will serve as an objective measure of pain, enabling disease agnostic, non-invasive, point-of-care assessments, and monitoring of treatment efficacy in women with chronic pain.
Topic 6: Revolutionary Breakthroughs
Implantable Lymphoid Organ Cancer Therapy
What if your own tumors could be converted to help fight ovarian cancer?
Topic 6: Revolutionary Breakthroughs
Eradicate Ovarian Cancer Now by Personalized Nanoparticles
What if boosting the immune system treated late-stage and metastatic ovarian cancer?
Topic 6: Revolutionary Breakthroughs
First Definitive & Non-Invasive Endometriosis Blood Test
What if we could diagnose endometriosis without surgery while finding new treatments?
Our project seeks to correct the weaknesses of the current endometriosis diagnostic paradigm. We will employ a multimodal approach that tracks disease progression to inform not just diagnosis, but longitudinally may be prognostic or even theragnostic for endometriosis therapeutic innovation.
Topic 6: Revolutionary Breakthroughs
OmniTACs to Fight Women's Cancer
What if the most common women's cancers could be cured by one drug?
The goal of this project is a groundbreaking therapeutic strategy against women's cancers using Induced Proximity Medicines (IPMs) to target a protein prevalent in breast and gynecological cancers. This innovative method selectively edits proteins by inducing proximity between effector proteins (EPs) and target proteins (TPs), modulating their therapeutic effects.
Topic 6: Revolutionary Breakthroughs
Revolutionizing Endometriosis Precision Medicine
What if diagnosing endometriosis was non-invasive and a personalized platform streamlined treatments?
Topic 6: Revolutionary Breakthroughs
Enabling New Therapies for Vaginal Health
What if balancing the vaginal microbiome could prevent recurrent infections and improve health?