The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) issued a notice modifying the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to establish the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H). This notice follows the official establishment of ARPA-H through the fiscal year (FY) 2022 omnibus appropriations package, which provided $1 billion for ARPA-H and empowered HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra to develop an organizational structure for the agency. The organization of ARPA-H will include the following offices:
- Grants Management
- Acquisition and Contracting
- Comptroller
- Engagement and Communications
- Legislative and Governmental Affairs
- Strategic Resources
- Treatment Innovation
- Health Equity, Dissemination, and Implementation
- Health Data
- Health Promotion and Disease Detection
- Health Resources and Policies
- Systems Technology
- Equity Inclusion
- Innovation and Entrepreneurship
In their establishment notice, HHS is providing a structure that is broader than initially conceived by members of Congress or even the President’s budget request. Some notable elements HHS is seeking to have ARPA-H focus on include bridging clinical care, biomedical research, the development of novel therapies, and health equity strategies that incorporate clinical practice in real-world settings.
Regarding mathematics and computational science, one of the priorities of the Health Data Office is to develop strategies to assemble interdisciplinary teams to “fuse mathematical approaches and biomedical research creating massive datasets that are carefully annotated, made widely available, allow for integration across programs, and are sensitive to issues of subject consent, personal privacy, and unintended biases that are crucial for addressing the most significant biomedical problems faced by society.” In addition, ARPA-H aims to cover a wide range of research areas with the Systems Technology Office focusing on physiologic systems to the broader healthcare system and “everything in between.” SIAM is happy to see this focus given the Committee on Science Policy’s advocacy for a disease-agnostic agency open to applied mathematicians and computational scientists and inclusive of all relevant research communities.
In addition to this directive establishing an organizational structure for ARPA-H, HHS also recently announced the first senior leader for this new agency. On May 25, HHS Secretary Becerra named Dr. Adam H. Russell as the acting deputy director for ARPA-H. Dr. Russell currently serves as the Chief Scientist at the University of Maryland’s Applied Research Laboratory for Intelligence and Security and previously served as a program manager for the Intelligence Advanced Research Project Activity (IARPA) and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). During his time at DARPA, Dr. Russell launched programs largely focused on revolutionizing social science around data, modeling, and better reproducibility.
Both the House and the Senate are still considering legislative packages that would provide official authorization for ARPA-H, which could also set directions for the agency. NIH leadership has indicated that additional staff for ARPA-H, including both program managers and operational staff, will be hired in the coming months, with plans to release the first Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) in the fall of 2022 with the goal of releasing the first ARPA-H funding by March 2023.