What We Fund
Focus Areas
The Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) funds research across four focus areas. All 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: Expanding what’s technically possible
Accelerating advances across research areas and removing limitations that stymie progress towards solutions. The tools and platforms developed apply to a broad range of diseases.
FOCUS AREA
Scalable Solutions: Reaching everyone quickly
Addressing challenges that include geography, distribution, manufacturing, data and information, and economies of scale to create programs that result in impactful, timely, and equitable solutions.
FOCUS AREA
Proactive Health: Keeping people from being patients
Reducing the likelihood that people become patients. Preventative programs will create new capabilities to detect and characterize disease risk and promote treatments and behaviors to anticipate threats to Americans’ health, whether those are viral, bacterial, chemical, physical, or psychological.
FOCUS AREA
Resilient Systems: Building integrated health care systems
Developing capabilities, business models, and integrations to endure crises such as pandemics, social disruption, and economic instability. Resilient systems need to sustain themselves between crises – from the molecular to the societal – to better achieve outcomes that advance American health and wellbeing.
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.