At barely a year old, the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health may be — as its director, Renee Wegrzyn, describes it — an agency still in its infancy. Even so, ARPA-H has a big agenda and an equally big budget of $2.5 billion to tackle it.
Wegrzyn said she spent the first year building up operational capacity and establishing contracting and budgeting teams. “What we have in place now I like to think of as our minimum viable agency,” she said…
Specificity is the key for ARPA-H, she added. The agency’s mission is to solve important but discrete health challenges, whether advancing cures for a disease or improving existing treatments or diagnostic systems in measurably and significant ways. ARPA-H does not seek to simply consolidate knowledge or come up with incremental improvement, but rather to take big risks for big payoff, Wegrzyn said.
“So what is that specific problem that the program manager is going to define?” she said. In choosing which proposals to back, she said the agency uses a structured framework developed at DARPA called the Heilmeier Catechism. It consists of a series of eight questions for approaching a problem developed by the late inventor and former DARPA Director George Heilmeier. It begins with this: “What are you trying to do? Articulate your objectives using absolutely no jargon.” Would-be program managers must also articulate the current state of the art, what they propose that’s new, why it matters and then the risks, costs and timetable for their deliverable… Read the full article here.
