Published
President Biden’s inclusion of ARPA-H in yesterday’s State of the Union comes just shy of one year since the agency was established. ARPA-H has an enormous opportunity and responsibility to find and accelerate health advances to achieve better, equitable outcomes for all people.
One of the most exciting aspects of ARPA-H is that we do not have a predetermined focus on one cure or treatment. The agency has hundreds of robust ideas in the application pipeline – received from a diverse mix of scientific visionaries aiming to join as Program Managers – to take on huge problems in health, from diabetes to mental health to rare diseases, including the role we can play in the President’s Cancer Moonshot.
Everyday ARPA-H moves closer to launching its first major challenges to improve health by expanding what’s technically possible, providing scalable and equitable solutions, keeping people from being patients, and building integrated health care systems. To do what we envision for ARPA-H will require us to work together with a very broad group of stakeholders, both federal and nongovernmental, from industry to caregivers to patients, to ensure that we’re taking on the right problems and delivering solutions that work in the real world.