The federal government can directly address the massive market failures at the heart of our healthcare enterprise by creating a new Health Advanced Research Projects Agency (HARPA) modeled on the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the agency used by the Department of Defense to create new National Defense Capabilities The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is the agency that the Department of Defense uses to develop the Department of Defense’s new national defense capabilities. President Bidens proposed that the Health Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA-H) seek to address long-standing problems within the health research ecosystem, recognizing that traditional approaches to funding, conducting, and disseminating research are not producing the expected results. President Biden’s Bold Proposal to Establish the Health Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA-H) President Biden’s Health Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA-H) is the right effort at the right time to redefine medical research and promote faster adoption breakthrough innovations.
Congress must follow through on President Biden’s ambitious plan to fully establish and fund ARPA-H to spur breakthrough research and innovation. Biden made the right move by offering $6.5 billion to build ARPA-H. Congress and the Biden administration must ensure that ARPA-H funding does not cut funding for NIH and other federal research agencies.
HARPA — or ARPA-H, as President Biden calls it in his concept paper — will be funded, but for general health problems. On the campaign trail, Joe Biden talked about creating a major health care agency that follows this model. In addition to ARPA-H, Biden today proposed creating an ARPA climate that would focus on developing technologies to combat global warming.
The new approaches can then be shared with other health research funding agencies, including other NIH institutions. ARPA-H offers a very different approach to research funding, using proactive program managers who select projects based on agency priorities rather than the traditional NIH grant review system.
Projects funded by these agencies also tend to be successful, and therefore generally represent more progress, said William Bonvillian, a policy researcher who studies DARPA at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. By contrast, programs funded by agencies such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) typically have little interaction between program managers and the researchers they fund, other than annual progress reports.
Meanwhile, supporters of biomedical research are concerned that the new agency will cut base budgets for 27 NIH institutes and centers. Representative Anna Eshu, who chairs the subcommittee on health and introduced the ARPA-H bill, said that biomedical research is currently divided between basic research conducted by the National Institutes of Health and biomedical innovation driven by companies seeking to commercialize scientific breakthroughs with market potential. Dr. Esther Krofa, executive director of Milken Institutes FasterCures and Center for Public Health, said NIH and ARPA-H can coexist well because the Department of Energy has its own advanced research agency, ARPA-e. Whatever the subject, an academic researcher familiar with both DARPA and ARPA-H sees the proposal as positive for the biomedical research community.
Those who testified on the subcommittee were generally in favor of establishing ARPA-H, but each biomedical research expert offered different views on the agency’s governance, independence and structure. Supporters of the push for the new agency welcomed the release, but some were disappointed that ARPA-H would not become an independent agency within the Department of Health and Human Services. Whether HHS or the president issues a directive calling for the creation of ARPA-H, Congress must eventually sign the agreement to create the new agency and approve the corresponding budget. Now that members of Congress have begun incorporating support for ARPA-H and health advancements into the 21st Century Drugs Act 2.0 and ARPA-H Act, the House Energy and Commerce Committee held hearings last week to make the research organization Moonshot a reality. .
Before leaving office last year, the president expressed support for the initiative as a way to improve mental health systems. The administration of US President Joe Bidens wants to create a $6.5 billion agency to accelerate innovation in healthcare and medicine, and revealed new details about the division last month. There is DARPA, which operates under the Department of Defense, and there is BARDA, the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Administration (part of the Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Health and Human Services). DARPA also differs from other federal research and development funding agencies in that it focuses on capacity building rather than just knowledge development.
Funding for projects at a wide variety of institutions, including universities, national laboratories, public and private companies, state and local governments, allows DARPA to access the full range of talent, skills, ideas, and resources that the federal government has to offer. While the NIH does a great job of funding basic scientific and clinical research, HARPA will build new opportunities on the foundation that agencies like the NIH and the Department of Veterans Affairs are building with their funding. HARPA will change the medical technology industry to deliver important innovations that will save millions of lives and billions of dollars. The identical operating principles of HARPA, based on urgency, leadership, high impact investment and accountability, will advance research from the lab to the patient.
Like its namesake, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), ARPA-H is expected to rely on time-bound, results-oriented strategies that are fundamentally different from existing U.S. federal investment in health research. What ARPA-H will provide to the National Institutes of Health is a new unit with some new powers that will allow us to move even faster and take more risks in special circumstances, as DARPA has done for defense for decades, and it has had some good hits. such as the internet, GPS, self-driving cars, and the like.