The creation of a $6.5 billion Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, also known as ARPA-H, is a new initiative proposed by President Biden in his full budget request to Congress for Fiscal Year 2022. ARPA-H is to be modeled after the similarly named Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The goal of ARPA-H is to deliver “breakthrough capabilities, technologies, systems, and platforms to accelerate innovations in health.” However, as CCS’s Dr Aysha Akhtar and Dr. Paul Locke from Johns Hopkins University commented in their op-ed in The Hill, how ARPA-H functions as an agency and how quickly it embraces human-biology based testing methods will be critical to its success in advancing medical science and improving human health.

In response to the op-ed, Congresswoman Anna Eshoo from California sent CCS a letter thanking us for the expert analysis. Read California Representative Anna Eshoo’s letter to CCS below: