Building an ARPA-H to Advance Medicine and Health
June 29, 2021
Four scientific and medical leaders endorse President Biden’s proposal to create an Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) within the National Institutes of Health. It would be patterned on DARPA, the groundbreaking defense agency. But in an important twist, Francis S. Collins, Tara A. Schwetz, Lawrence A. Tabak, and Eric S. Lander write in Science that ARPA-H should be structured to meet the particular needs of biomedical and health research, and they offer an operational blueprint. The idea reflects a proposal by Robert Cook-Deegan in Issues some 25 years ago that NIH needs something like DARPA. He argues that the DARPA model—built on expert staff, clear mission, focused effort, and lean management—can “effectively foster scientific and medical progress in critical areas and accomplish tasks when a new technology is promising but not yet proven.”