The fledgling Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health is about to pick up the pace. The new agency charged with funding high-risk, high-reward research unveiled its first program, NITRO, or Novel Innovations for Tissue Regeneration in Osteoarthritis, last month. It’s now seeking innovative plans from scientists to develop a breakthrough therapy that would allow the body to repair its own joints. Research proposals are due next month. It's the first of what's expected to become a steady clip of such announcements from ARPA-H, according to Amy Jenkins, who directs the agency’s Health Science Futures Office, one its four focus areas. The others are scalable solutions, proactive health and resilient systems. Jenkins, who joined ARPA-H this year after working at the agency on which it’s modeled — the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency — talked with Erin about her goals. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. What should people know about ARPA-H’s Health Science Futures Office? We’re trying to think about what foundational scientific breakthroughs, technological breakthroughs, we need to make in order to change health outcomes for the future. How can I envision these foundational advances? Any examples? I think of them on three scales. I think of it at the molecular scale — new ways of delivering drugs. I also think of a cellular or tissue scale — new ways of imaging the heart, new ways of imaging the brain — that are cheaper or faster. Then I think on the scale of the order of the body, so new surgical tools, new ways of doing surgery. Is there anything people get wrong about ARPA-H that we can clear up? People thought we were going to focus on just one disease, or a couple of diseases: cancer, Alzheimer’s, diabetes. The offices are actually formatted around the types of technologies and the types of innovations that may come out of them. A lot of people, when they first looked at our focus areas, were taken aback — they were expecting, you know, the cancer office. Now that people understand — we’ll have an office building foundations and fundamental science and technology breakthroughs, we’ll have an office that’s developing solutions that allow us to scale that could be applied to any disease state — I think that people are excited about that. It allows you to make massive impacts against a variety of disease states all at once. We are disease agnostic. Can NITRO tell us anything about future ARPA-H programs? One thing that’s really important that we do at ARPA-H is de-risking. We need to have at least a fundamental reason to believe an idea is possible — it may be very difficult or unlikely — but we want that fundamental understanding that it is possible. Then we want to de-risk by taking multiple approaches. Maybe there's four different paths to get to the solution. I think NITRO was a great example of that. If you read the NITRO announcement, we said you could potentially use cellular engineering; you could use biologics. Maybe we take four or five different approaches to try to de-risk what the future holds. Things that are very inventive are more achievable when we take multiple shots at getting to that final goal. What's coming down the pipeline? What can we anticipate in the near future? We are going to have program managers who are releasing NITRO-type solicitations very frequently. I would anticipate 20 or more of those types of announcements in the next calendar year. We also anticipate having close to 80 program managers eventually and them starting new programs about once every one and a half years. | 
