The Big Question

What if we had widely adopted objective measures of mental health and wellbeing?

The Problem

• Over their lifetime, half of all Americans will experience mental and behavioral health disorders, including addiction, anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder. The rates of addiction are higher for Veterans compared to the general population.
• Current mental and behavioral healthcare approaches lag far behind the urgent need and scientific opportunity. There are no predictive, scalable, or objective standardized measures of behaviorial health, making it impossible to know what is working, when, and for whom. 
• Despite extraordinary promise from novel approavhes such as neuroplastogens, neuromodulation, and digital therapeutics, current diagnostics and treatements rely on subjective endpoints and are not matched to individual needs. This results in a "trial-and-error" approach based on patchwork clinical trial data and outdated tools for assessing treatment outcomes which limits innovation, delays recovery, and increases disease burden.

The Solution

• EVIDENT aims to catalyze a new era in behavioral health by generating and validating objective FDA-ready clinical endpoints for emerging therapies, enabling rapid, personalized, and durable improvements in mental and behavioral health.
• With better data, patients will spend less time using therapies that aren't working for them, and their course of treatment can be quickly adapted to reflect their individual experience.
• ARPA-H is seeking multimodal, longitudinal data (e.g., psychological, social, digital, biological) collected in registered clinical trials testing the effects of rapid-acting interventions for behavioral health (e.g., neuroplastogens, neuromodulation, digital therapeutics). The data from this solicitation seeks to improve providers' ability to identify when a specific therapy will be most effective and monitor rapid treatment effects when they are occurring.

Only ARPA-H can…

• Bring together diverse research disciplines to establish robust, objective, and predictive measures of intervention effects. 
• Drive new standards for drug development and clinical care with broad public health impact.