“Following a lengthy deliberation process, US health secretary Xavier Becerra determined on Wednesday (March 30) that a new high-risk, high-reward biomedical research agency known as ARPA-H will be part of the National Institutes of Health, STAT reports.”
“In early March, Congress passed the 2022 US spending bill, which included $1 billion of funds for the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), an agency intended to accelerate the pace of biomedical research. The bill gave the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), of which the NIH is a part, the power to decide whether the new agency would be independent or part of the existing institution. This led to a lobbying campaign by several policymakers and researchers to separate the agency from the NIH, which they say is bureaucratic and slow-moving, STAT reported earlier this week.”
“Others advocated for ARPA-H to remain within the NIH, to help accelerate the agency’s launch by drawing on existing resources. Last year, President Joe Biden called for the creation of the ARPA-H as a biomedical research version of the military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which is known for risky projects and ‘blue-sky’ thinking and is partially credited for innovations such as the internet. Biden, along with former NIH director and interim White House science advisor Francis Collins and Sudip Parikh, the CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), supported the inclusion of the ARPA-H under the NIH umbrella. Collins tells Science that placing ARPA-H within the NIH would allow it to draw on the NIH’s ‘brain trust.'”
“An HHS spokesperson confirms to STAT in a statement that ARPA-H will be ‘under the auspices’ of the NIH but that its director will report directly to Becerra. The new agency will exist ‘as a new member of the HHS family with a distinct mission that will focus on rapid application of knowledge and catalyzing breakthrough medicines and technologies,’ he writes in the statement…” Read the full article here.
Source: ARPA-H to Be Within NIH but Independently Managed by HHS – By Natalia Mesa, April 1, 2022. The Scientist Magazine.
