UW ARPA-H Committee

UW ARPA-H Committee

ITHS is facilitating the UW ARPA-H Committee, a visioning committee to help research leaders develop strategy and direction related to a new federal funding agency. The committee is chaired by the ITHS Executive Director Tong Sun and includes representatives from the School of Medicine, College of Engineering, and School of Pharmacy, as well as leadership of the Institute for Protein Design and Population Health Initiative. The sponsors of the committee are Jihui Yang, Vice Dean of the College of Engineering, and Shelly Sakiyama-Elbert, Vice Dean of Research and Graduate Education of the School of Medicine. The UW ARPA-H Committee will identify key opportunities for collaboration, provide feedback on abstracts and assist with team development, and socialize ARPA-H across the UW research community.

Transformational Approaches to Big Health Challenges

What is ARPA-H?

The Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) is a federal funding agency that supports the development of high-impact research to drive biomedical and health breakthroughs to deliver transformative, sustainable, and equitable health solutions for everyone. ARPA-H’s mission focuses on leveraging research advances for real world impact. ARPA-H awardees are developing entirely new ways to tackle the hardest challenges in health. ARPA-H is collaborative, spirited, and driven by a commitment to accelerating life-changing health solutions.

ARPA-H Strategy

Like other Advanced Research Projects Agencies, ARPA-H provides research funding to create new opportunities and solve important problems through ambitious, well-defined, and measurable programs. Each program is led by a Program Manager (or PM) who champions a core idea, frames a challenge, and awards projects to multidisciplinary teams of performers, whose work is then measured and evaluated to ensure that only the best solutions advance.

ARPA-H supports research carried out by a wide variety of groups across the country, including everyone from academia and private industry to the government. Watch the video below to learn more about the ARPA-H model.

Request for Funding Proposals

ARPA-H opened its first Agency-wide Open Broad Agency Announcement (Open BAA), seeking funding proposals for research aiming to improve health outcomes across patient populations, communities, diseases, and health conditions. The BAA calls for revolutionary proposals to outline breakthrough research and technological advancements.

Proposals should investigate unconventional approaches, and challenge accepted assumptions to enable leaps forward in science, technology, systems, or related capabilities. ARPA-H also encourages concepts to advance the objectives of President Biden’s Cancer Moonshot, as well as more disease-agnostic approaches. ARPA-H is considering proposals under this BAA on a rolling basis through March 14, 2024.

ARPA-H held an informational proposers’ day on April 4, 2023 to answer questions from potential proposers. View a recording of the event or the slide deck that was presented.

Focus Areas

ARPA-H’s focus areas will unlock new ways to collaborate and attack problems.

Specific Funding Programs & Initiatives

In addition to the Open BAA, ARPA-H is developing projects and programs to tackle specific thorny challenges. Emerging programs issue specific solicitations to find teams and solutions in the area of interest. Watch ARPA-H announcements for the latest opportunities.

Programs

• Resilient Extended Automatic Cell Therapies (REACT)
  
  • The Big Question: What if your body could make its own medicine?
  • Abstracts due Nov. 30, 2023
• Antigens Predicted for Broad Viral Efficacy through Computational Experimentation (APECx)
  
  • The Big Question: What if we could eliminate viruses as current and future health threats?
  • Abstracts due Dec. 1, 2023
• Precision Surgical Interventions (PSI) 
  
  • The Big Question: What if surgeries fixed problems flawlessly, the first time?
  • PSI BAA call for proposals forthcoming, deadline TBD
• Novel Innovations for Tissue Regeneration in Osteoarthritis (NITRO)
  • The Big Question: What if we could make our joints heal themselves?
  • Submissions closed

   

  Other Initiatives

• Biomedical Data Fabric Toolbox
  • Goal: Build a unified, consistent layer of data services that can work across many different systems and environments
  • Proposals due Nov. 28, 2023
• Digital Health Security (DIGIHEALS)
  • Goals: Reduce the ability for bad actors to attack digital health software and hardware. Enable the prevention of large-scale cyberattacks.
  • Submissions closed

How the UW ARPA Committee Can Help You

The UW ARPA-H Committee seeks to serve as a resource for the research community by supporting development and implementation of strategies to engage ARPA-H as well as concept and project team development for ARPA-H submissions.

If you’re interested in submitting a concept proposal to ARPA-H, the committee can help by providing feedback on your abstract, including appropriately scaling your budget and project scope, and/or by connecting you with potential collaborators and other experts essential for your project.

UW ARPA-H Committee Members