The Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, also known as ARPA-H, is a new biomedical research agency that was unveiled by the Biden administration on Tuesday. The agency’s initial two centres will be located in the Dallas and Boston areas, respectively.
Instead of concentrating all of its operations in a single location, the organisation operates according to the “hub-and-spoke” concept. Members of Congress have spent years lobbying to bring the agency and the subsequent STEM employment to their respective districts, despite the fact that the charter of the agency stipulated that it would not be placed in Washington, District of Columbia.
Rep. Michael C. Burgess, a Republican from Texas, was the leader of a coalition of 18 Texas politicians that wrote a letter to ARPA-H Director Renee Wegrzyn on Thursday, encouraging her to choose Dallas as the location for the agency’s customer experience centre. In the letter, they pointed out that the city already has a “thriving ecosystem of life science companies” and that it is close to two airports.
ARPANET-H, a statewide health innovation network consisting of three core hubs, was also launched with the announcement made on Tuesday. Each hub will operate as a regional centre, and its associated spokes will be located all throughout the country.
The customer experience hub in Dallas will place a primary emphasis on expanding the kinds of clinical studies being conducted, expanding access to representative patient populations, and improving overall health outcomes.
The “investor catalyst hub” will be located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, just outside of Boston. Its primary mission will be to facilitate the transformation of ideas into practical applications through collaboration among investors, businesspeople, and academic researchers.
The federal government will collaborate with a third group of stakeholders who will serve as a hub for operations. The specific location of this site has not yet been decided upon, but it will be located in the National Capital Region in some capacity and the location will be revealed later on in this year.
In a press release, Wegrzyn was quoted as saying, “By utilising a hub-and-spoke model, we are creating efficiencies that we otherwise could not achieve. These efficiencies include rapidly reaching patients, providers, and other stakeholders.” “With a nod to the history of DARPA’s original ARPANET, which eventually became the internet, we are establishing the foundation for an ambitious 50-state network to support health innovation across the entirety of the United States,”
The agency has named 10 initial “spokes,” which will conduct research in consortium with the ARPA-H hubs with locations at existing research facilities in Alabama, Alaska, California, Colorado, Florida, Minnesota, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Washington state and Wisconsin.
In the meanwhile, it is not yet clear how much money will be allocated to the newly formed organisation. The ARPA-H budget would be reduced from $1 billion to $500 million under the House’s version of the appropriations plan for fiscal year 2024. The financing for the programme is maintained at its current level of $1.5 billion per year under the version of the plan being considered by the Senate.
