Looking to gamble, newest U.S. health agency places first research bets

A year ago, when applied biologist Renee Wegrzyn took the helm of the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), questions swirled around the brand-new agency, which was created by President Joe Biden to fund daring, cutting-edge biomedical research. Would the new organization be sufficiently different from the sluggish, risk-averse National Institutes of Health (NIH)? How would Wegrzyn, who had never run an agency, navigate pressures from Congress to shape the effort? And how quickly could she recruit the type of innovative scientific staff needed to identify out-of-the-box projects on which to spend a billion-dollar budget? Now, answers are starting to emerge. ARPA-H has in recent months announced a growing list of research awards for efforts the agency says are more ambitious, and less certain to succeed, than what NIH would typically support. Among them: a plan to regenerate cartilage and bone in osteoarthritis patients and an unprecedented effort to build a functioning heart using 3D printing with living cells. The agency has hired 390 staffers, some of whom will take an unusually active role in shaping research without the outside peer-review NIH projects typically get. By the end of September, ARPA-H had already tentatively obligated close to $1 billion of its initial $2.5 billion budget. “Nothing like this has ever existed inside the health ecosystem,” Wegrzyn told Science in an interview last week at ARPA-H’s current offices, a...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research