Pursuing Health Breakthroughs

The Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) provides research funding to build high-payoff capabilities or platforms to drive biomedical breakthroughs – ranging from the molecular to societal – that will provide transformative solutions for all individuals. The focus areas below illustrate the types of work and impact that ARPA-H may pursue as it hires its first Program Managers.

Focus Areas

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.

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.

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.

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.