ARPA White House and NIH officials hopped onto a 90-minute Zoom call yesterday to discuss the proposed NIH entity “Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health,” or ARPA-H.
As the proposed agency may have similar autonomy to other agencies such as DARPA, this agency would focus primarily on biomedical research, according to NIH Director Francis Collins, who will be retiring from his position by the end of the year.
To Collins, ARPA-H is an opportunity to stretch boundaries and see what could be possible. By way of example, he named technology to deliver drugs to only the exact right cell type, or an mRNA vaccine that would immunize a patient against the fifty most common mutations that cause solid tumors, to next-gen wearable sensors to help a patient manage chronic disease.
Tara Schwetz, from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), concurred with Collins.
“The goals of ARPA-H are really to support transformative, high risk, high reward medical research, and embracing a sense of urgency to speed, the application and implementation of breakthroughs at a variety of different levels,” Schwetz said.
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