The Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) is a new federal funding agency designed to propel biomedical and health research that has the potential to transform health for all.
ARPA-H supports bold and imaginative approaches — from the molecular to the societal level — to solve critical health challenges. In contrast to traditional funding sources and sponsors, the agency, which is modeled after the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), makes substantial investments in high-risk, high-impact solutions that will benefit everyone.
ARPA-H awards funding for projects under an agency-wide Open Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) that calls for proposals to revolutionize prevention, treatment, and cures for a range of diseases, as well as individual program opportunities that target specific approaches to improve health.
Program-specific calls for abstracts and proposals, and additional funding opportunities are announced frequently via SAM.gov, as well as the agency's website and newsletter.
ARPA-H has identified four priority focus areas that capture its vision for future programs and opportunities the agency plans to offer as it hires new program managers, as well as examples of profound impacts and projects that are awarded funding.
Pushing the boundaries of current science with innovative tools, technologies, and platforms. Examples include novel molecular platform approaches, and methods to accelerate mammalian and microbial cellular engineering to enable next-generation therapeutic applications.
Addressing challenges like geography or distribution to help get solutions to everyone more quickly. Examples include treatment approaches for the pediatric population that include changing physiology and developmental status, and ideas to reduce or eliminate health disparities.
Creating new capabilities to prevent threats to health and reduce the likelihood that people become patients. Examples include novel diagnoses or interventions to reduce health disparities, as well as development of machine-enhanced computational models to predict changes in health status.
Developing more stable and reliable systems that can endure crises such as pandemics, and social and economic disruption. Examples include novel methods to engineer resilient tissues or microbiomes to maintain health, and new ways to protect, analyze, or present health data.
Heilmeier Questions guide ARPA-H programs and are important to consider as part of the abstract submission process.
After reviewing Open BAA abstracts, ARPA-H will provide one of the following responses:
Feedback and outcomes may differ for individual ARPA-H programs. Review the award administration information in the program BAA documents for specific responses.
As a top research university, Rutgers is a hub for the kinds of pioneering minds and interdisciplinary work that ARPA-H is looking for. The research administrations of Rutgers' chancellor-led units encourage investigators and teams who are interested in ARPA-H funding to explore opportunities for collaboration with their peers and reach out to their research deans or institute/center directors for assistance with proposal submissions.