Congress approves establishment of new advanced research agency for health

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Congress voted today to establish a new Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, known as ARPA-H, within the National Institutes of Health to find new cures and treatments for some of the world’s most difficult diseases – such as cancer, Alzheimer’s, diabetes and more.

Unlike other federal research entities, ARPA-H will be nimble and modeled largely after the Department of Defense’s highly successful DARPA program, which is responsible for developing some of the most consequential technologies of our time – including the Internet, GPS and self-driving cars.

“Like DARPA, ARPA-H will bring together some of the nation’s greatest minds and give them access to the federal government’s virtually limitless resources to make the impossible, possible,” said U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette (D-CO), who co-led the effort on Capitol Hill to create the new agency. “This is the start of a whole new era in biomedical research. The work that will soon be done by this agency will likely shape the future of biomedical research in this country for many years to come.”

The effort to create ARPA-H began shortly after President Biden was elected to office. Biden met with DeGette, U.S. Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI) and others in the Oval Office in March 2021 to discuss the president’s plan to create a new advanced research agency to find a cure for cancer.

 After that meeting DeGette and Upton, who had worked together with then Vice-President Biden to include his Cancer Moonshot program in their landmark 21^st Century Cures Act legislation, immediately began working with their colleagues to draft the legislation needed to create the new agency.

Unlike other federal agencies, ARPA-H will be run by a relatively small number of program managers who will each be given a high degree of autonomy to choose which high-risk, high-reward projects to pursue.

The primary focus of the new agency will be to accelerate biomedical research and develop innovative new treatments and cures for some of the world’s deadliest diseases. It will also be tasked with developing breakthrough technologies that would otherwise die in the commercial market.

Previous efforts to apply the DARPA-like model to the field of biomedical research have already proven highly successful. In fact, DARPA was the agency that initially funded Moderna’s mRNA technology – that was then used to develop its highly effective COVID-19 vaccine – when other agencies were skeptical of the approach.

Further developing that mRNA technology to possibly prevent cancer is one of the projects that advocates of ARPA-H say the agency could pursue.

In addition to establishing the new advanced research agency for health, the legislation now headed to President Biden’s desk to be signed into law includes several other health care measures DeGette and Upton had introduced as part of their Cures 2.0 legislation, including:

• Requiring the federal government to create a national strategy to prepare for, and respond to, future pandemics and public health emergencies. Under provisions of the bill, federal officials will be required to use lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic to improve the federal government’s pandemic preparedness procedures and develop a comprehensive, nationwide plan to respond to future public health emergencies.
• Requiring more diversity in clinical trials to ensure any new drugs and treatments approved for use in the U.S. are both safe and effective for a greater – and more representative – portion of the population.