The Biden administration has introduced the formation of the Superior Analysis Venture Company for Well being (ARPA-H), a company that will likely be housed inside the Nationwide Institutes of Well being (NIH) with the mission of bringing to drugs the sort of breakthrough analysis concepts and strategies that led to the arrival of the web and GPS.
Whereas innovation is desperately wanted in medical care — and DARPA, the U.S. Division of Protection company that ARPA-H is modeled after, affords a compelling mannequin — the previous two years of the pandemic have revealed that the main focus of ARPA-H ought to be radically totally different than what’s being proposed.
Whereas nascent, the present plans for ARPA-H are to spend money on analysis for most cancers, Alzheimer’s and diabetes, amongst different diseases. This disease-oriented method might yield new medicine, detection strategies, and therapeutics for situations that have already got vital analysis funding and investigation underway on the NIH. It will not change the sobering undeniable fact that the US ranks forty second in life expectancy worldwide, has the very best suicide, toddler and maternal mortality price amongst industrialized nations, and has alarming disparities in well being amongst Blacks, Hispanics, Indigenous People, and different marginalized communities, with a 20-year longevity hole based mostly on the place you reside — your zip code, not your genetic code. In reality, as we noticed with the groundbreaking COVID-19 vaccines, medical improvements on their very own — with out the general public well being infrastructure in place to successfully deploy them — threat leaving weak communities behind and worsening well being inequities.
As an alternative, ARPA-H should fund breakthrough public well being applied sciences that may enhance well being outcomes and fairness at the moment and modernize our public well being infrastructure for many years to come back. Listed below are 5 such examples:
- Pandemic response and surveillance: A key to mitigating COVID-19 was “last-mile” supply improvements resembling drive-through testing and pop-up vaccine clinics, however we may go a lot additional. Proper now we lack correct COVID case counts as a result of at-home checks are expensive and lack connectivity to public well being departments. ARPA-H may fund second-generation at-home checks which are far inexpensive to supply and are linked. It may additionally fund new vaccine supply modalities resembling vaccine patches that may very well be self-administered, simplifying their administration and probably reducing vaccine hesitancy.
- Psychological well being disaster: Lower than half of individuals with psychological sickness obtain applicable therapy ), and deaths of despair together with drug overdoses, suicide, and alcoholism are main causes of mortality in the US, with alarmingly excessive charges in younger folks. The PHQ-9, essentially the most extensively used screening software for despair developed over 20 years in the past, fails to diagnose 12-15 p.c of individuals with this sickness and requires a healthcare skilled to manage, a barrier for not less than one-quarter of People. ARPA-H may fund breakthrough applied sciences to investigate knowledge collected from smartphones, voice calls and textual content messages and generate alerts that folks could also be depressed, anxious or in danger for suicidal or homicidal conduct. It may additionally fund new interventions that enhance psychological well being resilience and assist deal with psychological diseases resembling despair, PTSD, schizophrenia and bipolar dysfunction utilizing applied sciences resembling digital avatars and psychological well being coaches skilled with evidence-based greatest practices to assist increase our depleted psychological well being workforce.
- Illness prevention and conduct change: The tripling in weight problems charges over the previous 20 years might consequence within the first technology of People who aren’t as wholesome as their dad and mom. ARPA-H may deal with weight problems and kind 2 diabetes at a inhabitants degree by funding synthetic intelligence (AI) chatbots for well being designed for and by weak communities and, for people on the opposite aspect of the digital divide, group well being staff who help folks of their properties and neighborhoods utilizing superior determination help software program.
- Social determinants of well being: Forty p.c of well being outcomes in America are pushed by social determinants of well being — components resembling training, housing, transportation and meals safety which are upstream of the normal healthcare system. The issue is multifactorial, however one problem is matching a person’s wants with out there social companies. Throughout the pandemic, we discovered that we will program mRNA into vaccines however can’t assist folks determine the place to get vaccinated or examined of their neighborhoods. The identical sort of info hole exists for locating housing and authorized assist, meals banks, low-cost transportation, and drugs help packages. ARPA-H may spend money on mapping group sources digitally so correct knowledge is on the market to any healthcare supplier or particular person trying to deal with a person’s social wants and assist overcome obstacles to healthcare.
- Public well being communication: COVID-19 uncovered how distrust and misinformation can hinder essentially the most superior medical breakthroughs. ARPA-H may spend money on harnessing new social media instruments and superior analytics to assist public well being professionals determine and break chains of transmission and include “outbreaks of misinformation” whereas delivering efficient prevention messages at scale. Moreover, there’s an estimated 17-year science-to-service gap within the dissemination of analysis findings into medical observe. Within the Digital Age, this ought to be a nanosecond. ARPA-H can develop modern methods to hurry the adoption of greatest practices.
ARPA-H holds great promise however as COVID-19 has laid naked, we will’t afford to maintain doing extra of the identical. NIH ought to undertake extra of DARPA’s high-risk, high-reward methods for transformative options in funding a few of its disease-oriented analysis. Nonetheless, by specializing in underfunded issues that affect well being throughout a number of ailments and require cross-agency in addition to cross-sectoral collaboration, we will put the “H” in ARPA-H and advance well being for all.
Shantanu Nundy, MD, is a main care doctor within the security web and Chief Medical Officer of Accolade. She is the writer of “Care after Covid: What the Pandemic Revealed is Damaged in Healthcare and Easy methods to Reinvent It.”
Susan J. Blumenthal, MD, MPA, is the senior coverage and medical advisor at amfAR, The Basis for AIDS Analysis, a senior fellow in well being coverage at New America, a visiting professor on the MIT Media Lab, and a medical professor at Georgetown and Tufts College Faculties of Medication. She is a former U.S. assistant surgeon basic and a retired rear admiral.
