ARPA-H to invest in leading-edge approaches to mental health treatment

The Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) today announced it will invest up to $100 million in more quantitative measures of mental and behavioral health through its new Evidence-Based Validation & Innovation for Rapid Therapeutics in Behavioral Health (EVIDENT) initiative.

EVIDENT will pursue two foundational components to improve behavioral and mental health care: more robust data on individual clinical outcomes, as well as a patient’s unique response to novel treatment approaches. Establishing such objective measures of mental and behavioral health will accelerate innovative diagnostics and treatments for these disorders. 

“Through EVIDENT, we aim to break through longstanding barriers in mental health measurement, diagnosis, and treatment — bringing faster, more precise solutions to all Americans,” said ARPA-H Director Alicia Jackson, PhD. “With robust data and novel therapies, we are paving the way for understanding the best uses of groundbreaking treatments and demystifying the field of mental health.”

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. Yet, today’s treatments are rarely tailored to an individual and thus remain largely trial-and-error, based on patchwork clinical trial data and outdated tools for assessing treatment outcomes. 

Novel approaches to treat mental health disorders, such as neuroplastogens (compounds that quickly promote the nervous system's ability to adapt structurally and functionally), neuromodulation, and digital therapeutics, have shown extraordinary promise to revolutionize behavioral health, especially for veterans. Despite this potential, current diagnostics and treatments rely on subjective endpoints and are not matched to individual needs, resulting in a “trial-and-error” approach that limits innovation. Beyond biomarkers, there is an opportunity to combine data to garner clearer insights into a person’s mental state — and, in turn, predict what treatments will work swiftly and optimally for any individual. 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.   

Through a forthcoming solicitation, 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). These deidentified data and biological samples will then be curated and stored within a Rapid Response Data Repository managed by an ARPA-H partner, to enable research and accelerate future discoveries. 

The data from this solicitation also seeks to improve providers’ ability to identify when a specific therapy will be most effective and monitor rapid treatment effects when they are occurring. This will indicate when a treatment is or is not working for an individual, rather than taking a trial-and-error approach, and ultimately, will reduce the burden of mental illness, lower healthcare costs, and improve quality of life for millions of Americans.

EVIDENT awards are not grants, but actively managed contracts, where each performer’s continuation of work will be contingent upon successful performance reviews by ARPA-H, demonstrating measurable progress toward defined milestones, including data collection, quality, and delivery. 

For more information, visit the EVIDENT at the ARPA-H Customer Experience Hub.

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