ARPA-H Broad Agency Announcement

Program Overview 

    On March 15, 2023, ARPA-H announced the availability of its first Agency-wide open BAA for research proposals that improve health outcomes across patient populations, communities, diseases, and health conditions. The BAA calls for innovative research and technological advancements that “investigate unconventional approaches, and challenge accepted assumptions to enable leaps forward in science, technology, systems, or related capabilities.” The Agency seeks to fund projects that propose groundbreaking new approaches in addressing health-related challenges through high-potential, high-impact biomedical and health research. Innovations from all stages of technology readiness are encouraged that align with ARPA-H’s mission to “accelerate better health outcomes and undertake research that cannot otherwise be pursued within the health funding ecosystem due to the nature of the technical risk.”

     The BAA outlines four focus areas prioritized by the department: 1) Health Science Futures; 2) Scalable Solutions; 3) Proactive Health; and 4) Resilient Systems (See details below). In addition, the Agency will consider proposals outside of the focus areas, such as targeted investments in tools that enable quantitative measurements of health outcomes, promote end-user adoption, facilitate participatory research, and advance relevant Ethical, Legal, and Societal Implications (ELSI) topics.  

Focus Areas & Initiatives 

ARPA-H is prioritizing the following focus areas:

1. The Health Science Futures focus area supports the development of tools, technologies, and platforms that can be applied to a broad range of diseases. Applicants should address diseases that affect large populations, rare diseases, or diseases that have limited treatments. Approaches that are disease agnostic are encouraged, and approaches that produces “radically new insights” that can establish generalizable models to addressing diseases such as cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s Disease, infectious diseases, and cardiovascular disease.

2. The Scalable Solutions focus area supports efforts that improve access and affordability of healthcare and disease response, including addressing the health ecosystem or geographical challenges that affect healthcare accessibility. Applicants should provide methods that reduce or eliminate health disparities and reduce the cost of treatments for rare diseases, especially in rural or low resource settings.

3. The Proactive Health focus area supports preventative efforts that reduce the likelihood of medical intervention or minimize the time patients are in acute care. Applicants are expected to create new capabilities to identify and characterize disease risk, reduce comorbidities, and promote treatments and behaviors to address challenges to human health (I.e., viral, bacterial, physical, psychological, environmental, or aging).

4. The Resilient Systems focus area supports the creation of capabilities, mechanisms, and accelerated system integrations that will assist healthcare efforts during disruptions and crises, such as pandemics, social disruption, climate change, molecular disturbances, and economic instability. Applicants can propose projects that will address and prepare for these potential disturbances, including software systems, manufacturing pipelines, biophysical systems, microbiomes, patient communities to provider networks, and more.

ARPA-H seeks to fund proposals that advance the goals of government-wide initiatives, such as:

• Cancer Moonshot;

• Advancing the American Bioeconomy;

• Clinical Trial Readiness;

• the National Strategy on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health;

• the National Action Plan for Combatting Anti-Microbial Resistance; or

• unity agenda priorities on addressing mental health and curbing the opioid epidemic.

Eligibility    

Eligible applicants: Any entity capable of satisfying the BAA requirements may submit a proposal. 

Cost Sharing: Not required, but encouraged. 

Key Dates 

Abstract Deadline: March 14, 2024

Resources: 

View the Opportunity here.

View the ARPA-H website here.

 Read the Press release here.