ARPA-H is Open for Business

Launched one year ago by the administration of US President Joe Biden, the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) has announced its first call for research proposals. The agency, armed with a US$2.5 billion budget, aims to shake up the conventional model of funding biomedical research — which some deem too slow and conservative — by funding high-risk, high-reward projects.

ARPA-H is meant to follow in the footsteps of the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), whose work laid the foundation for the modern Internet and GPS. But critics have questioned whether such a risk-based model will work for the life sciences, especially after administration officials announced that the agency would be housed in the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), a more conventional funder of biomedical research.