The recently formed Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health is already at the forefront of the healthcare industry’s efforts to develop artificial intelligence use cases.
ARPA-H Director Renee Wegrzyn shared her agency’s priorities and commitment to public-private partnerships at the NVIDIA AI Summit in Washington, D.C. in October. The audience included AI and robotics experts and other technologists, all eager to learn about new capabilities in the works.
The AI ecosystem is thriving. Approximately 90% of private sector AI adopters have found new use cases while implementing the emerging technology, and more than 50% had their leaders opt to expand its use, according to a 2024 report by Honeywell. ARPA-H is plunging headfirst into it as well.
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What Is ARPA-H, and What Role Does It Play in Healthcare Innovation in the U.S.?
The launching of Sputnik by the Soviet Union in 1957 caught the U.S. by surprise. That led to the establishment of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), designed to ensure that the U.S. maintains a more proactive posture regarding technological advances.
Similarly, the Biden administration established ARPA-H in 2022 to lead to breakthroughs in the healthcare space with the aim of “accelerating better health outcomes” for everyone, Wegrzyn said. ARPA-H brings on program managers for limited terms to tackle key issues in health, such as specific chronic illnesses.
“ARPA-H lives in the future, and so do we at NVIDIA,” said Rory Kelleher, global business development lead for healthcare and life sciences at NVIDIA, during the company’s summit. “We are in the business of time machines, trying to help make what’s impossible possible.”
The new federal agency has four focus areas: health science futures, scalable solutions, proactive health and resilient systems.
So, how do AI and accelerating computation push these programs forward? “We’re a really great agency to pilot and test things out,” Wegrzyn said. Explaining one program targeting the expansion of advanced healthcare for rural communities, she mentioned the potential of “AI-assisted task guidance” that can support rural healthcare workers who may lack certain medical skills by coaching them on high-level care and thus upskilling them.
ARPA-H has issued an open call for their PRECISE-AI program, which hopes to address the issue of AI tools becoming less reliable once updated data is added. “Once these tools are fielded, how do you maintain their performance? How do you learn as you experience that real-world data, and make sure that these are tools that can last long into the future?” Wegrzyn asked.
Unlike DARPA, which has the backing of the Department of Defense to further investments, ARPA-H relies on fostering “good relationships with the investor community and with the commercial sector to help take on the investments to the next advanced development stage,” Wegrzyn said, which is why the agency launched its Investor Catalyst Hub.
Data privacy and security are also key considerations as the agency explores AI-driven use cases. It has several cybersecurity-focused programs, such as UPGRADE, that aim to improve industry standards and capabilities.
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