 How would you like a hundred million dollars to allocate to whatever healthcare brainchild moonshot you can concoct? That's what ARPA H is offering its program managers and their hiring. ARPA H is basically DARPA for healthcare. DARPA is the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency responsible for the funding of groundbreaking technology like, oh, I don't know, the internet, GPS, the mouse, Siri, and this stealth boat called the Sea Shadow IX-529 or, by its nickname, Darth Vader's f*** tub. Hey, I don't make up the names. I do. I made that name up. Okay, anyway, ARPA H is the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health and they operate the same way. They direct government funds towards civilian projects, this time with a focus on healthcare breakthroughs like a universal vaccine, tissue regeneration, new robotic surgical procedures, or implantable pharmacies, which sound amazing until you think about your device being hacked and flooding your system with fentanyl. The point is there are good ideas being funded and also some Darth Vader boats. Look, the world is headed to crazy town fast. ARPA H is trying to make sure that we're alive to see it. So if you think you're the right person to help direct these government funds, or if you just want to know what the government's up to, you're going to want to watch this video. We've got highlights from an exclusive interview with ARPA H Innovation Fellow Arunan Shakhandaraja, I'm trying, who spoke at the Lifespan.io Longevity Conference where he said, President Biden has really set this agency up as one of his marquee initiatives. It's true, Biden is throwing a ton of money at curing his biggest political problem, his age. This is the Senate Appropriations Bill 2024. Biden gave ARPA H 2.5 billion in 2024, up from 1.5 billion in 2023. And on page 136, it talks specifically about reversing aging. The committee urges ARPA H to prioritize two areas of geroscience research that could advance the field dramatically, biomarkers and epigenetic reprogramming. Discovering and validating biomarkers for aging would significantly improve the efficacy of interventions, while epigenetic reprogramming of cellular age could slow down or even reverse the aging process and thereby prevent or delay the entire panoply of age-related diseases. Panoply. A complete or impressive collection of things. And in today's episode, I'm going to give you the inside track on what ARPA H is working on, how you could become an ARPA H program manager, and what it would mean to the world if ARPA H has the same impact as DARPA. Yep, we're covering the entire ARPA H panoply. Welcome to Lifespan News, I'm your host, Emmett Short. Make sure you subscribe to the channel and check out Lifespan.io for extremely up to the minute longevity breakthrough news. And smash the like on this video, if you will. Let's get straight to the fun stuff. What is ARPA H and how does it work? Program managers or PMs kick off ARPA H's research process by using their specialized expertise to identify a challenge that, if solved, has the potential to transform an important area of medicine or health from developing an affordable personalized cancer vaccine to printing replacement organs in a lab. But it should be uniquely hard and not something that can be easily solved through traditional research or commercial activity. PMs will launch several programs during their time at ARPA H, which typically last three to six years. When their tenure ends, other program managers step in to replace them and also start their own programs. This allows for a constant flow of new ideas and approaches. If things don't progress as expected, aspects of the work may stop while other development continues. This allows PMs to invest in bold ideas while increasing the overall chances for success. Though some programs fail, others will succeed and valuable lessons are learned from each. The most successful programs graduate from ARPA H and are then transferred to our partners. There you go, the life cycle of a research program at ARPA H. There are four programs currently highlighted on their website. None of them specifically to do with age reversal, which is why I thought it was important to make this video. Even if you're not interested in the job, maybe you just go subscribe to their YouTube channel, which only has 400 subs. So go subscribe and engage with them on their socials and let them know about your interest in longevity. The point is this is how you influence how the money gets spent. So go tell them to classify aging as a disease or urge them to put the money towards solving a challenge that you care about, whatever that is. But let's take a look at these programs. Let's start with the universal vaccine. What if we could eliminate viral disease by developing vaccines that work against multiple different viruses at once? What if we could administer vaccines with a patch and not a needle? Being in the high-risk high reward space at ARPA H is a chance to actually do this and break the paradigm and the struggles that we have out in the vaccine and therapeutic community. A cynical person might say, sure, yeah, let's get rid of a 30 billion dollar a year industry. They'll never let it happen. Chris Rock famously said, they no money in the cure. But the reality is when cars replaced horse and buggies, it wasn't the end. It was a new beginning. This shift could actually be the beginning of a new gold mine. And I think Big Pharma knows this. We're talking about opening up vast new markets, broad spectrum vaccines and advanced viral therapies mean big investments in biotech and a surge in demand for specialized medicine. So current pharmaceutical giants who want this ARPA H money are going to pivot, leveraging their infrastructure and experience to lead this new wave. It's not just about curing. It's about innovating and innovation. That's where the real money is. Okay. Tissue regeneration. What if we could make your joints heal themselves? What if we could say we're going to give you one surgery? It'll be your cells and your bone or close similarity to them and your body will make its own joint and you'll never need surgery again. What if your grandmother who slips and falls and needs a hip replacement only gets it once, never has surgery again and lives a great quality of life for the remaining 20, 30, 40, 50 years? Yeah, you lost me at Grandma Dies. Why can't she live forever in our fantasy? I also got to make fun of ARPA a little bit here. It's not super inspiring that the government agency focused on future technology is still making videos in the same aspect ratio as Seinfeld just saying. Okay. Advanced surgeries. Imagine if surgery speaks problems perfectly the first time. This is a program that I'm really excited about. I believe it will have a very large impact and this impact will be across diseases and across multiple patient populations. The major outcomes of the program will be surgical tools that will benefit surgeons and patients. They will enable surgeons to do the surgeries faster and better and they will enable patients to have single operations and not have any structures accidentally injured during the surgeries. I just had an experimental surgery on my thumb. I'm still holding out hope that it'll turn the corner and recover, but yeah, seven months and I'm still getting a lot of pain. So if there was a way to know the exact problem and the exact odds of a full recovery and eliminate human error and even new tools and procedures, I think I would have felt a lot more comfortable getting my surgery and confident that the outcome would be great. Anyway, I like this one because even if aging is cured, there's always going to be a need for different kinds of surgeries. All right. Lastly, implantable pharmacies. What if your body could make its own medicine? What if knowing what is going on inside of your body is as easy as looking at a smartphone? The program focuses on two devices. A living pharmacy that produces a therapy inside of your body where and when it's needed and a living sentinel that tracks what's going inside of your body so that they know the state of their disease. The technology coming out of this program could be applied in so many ways. If you can think of people with thyroid issues, people with obesity challenges, people with diabetes who have constantly maintained their healthcare, these devices will take care of that flow. This is the one that I kind of don't like because it's a treatment and not a cure. If we can just set people's bodies up correctly at the cellular level, we won't have a need for this internal pharmacy. Now, having some implants that scan your blood and update you on your health and you can see it on your smartphone, that's awesome. But let's think bigger beyond therapies and more towards cures. And this is why I'm making this video for you guys to either go become a program manager or just engage with them and tell them your thoughts in the comments section. Let me know in the comments what you would like the money to go towards if you were a program manager and be specific. And now, if you're thinking, well, I couldn't be a program manager or it's a government job, it probably doesn't pay well, or I don't want to take a detour in my career, you may be surprised what ARPAH Innovation Fellow Arunan Skandaraja, pretty sure I'm getting that, had to say at our recent Longevity conference. I'm going to play you a short clip, but if you'd like to watch the entire interview, it's posted on the Lifespan.io YouTube channel. Here are a couple of quick highlights. How do we incentivize people to apply for this? Because while it is an amazing opportunity itself, people do have to give up some stuff, especially career scientists, for example, they have to give up their lab, for example. Yeah. So I think there's two parts of that question. I mean, one is, can you have a true second job while you're in government? Generally, the answer is no, both for conflict reasons and also because this is definitely not a part-time job, but it's also designed for health with healthcare providers of mine. And that's true for DARPA as well. Our first PM who launched Nitro is a surgeon. And so you are able to stay licensed. Basically, you have a few days a month that you can focus on your clinical practice so that you can maintain your certification for folks who are in the physics and engineering space, NSF also has this sort of model where you come in generally for a two-year term, sometimes with the renewal, and universities are pretty understanding. There's actually a government act that lets universities send folks over to government without breaking their term of contract. What we're really looking for are people who see a gap that can't be fixed where they are. We have definitely had people within professors for 10 or 15 years. They can continue to mentor their students and teach, but they're also seeing some sort of critical barrier that from their position as someone who's just receiving relatively small blocks of funding at a time and trying to parcel that together into a vision, maybe they can't do. And having the luxury of spending two to three years focused on building a community and fusing that community with a huge amount of funding is a real career capstone sort of moment. And we've seen at least in DARPA, which has had alumni of all sorts, people can then transition back into the research lab if that's their interest. We've seen other folks who are seeing innovation and have caught the entrepreneurship bug, kind of move on over into the company formation side or the VC side, or people who move on into a university administration trying to build centers around areas of their passion. I don't think that you should see this as a as a dip in your career. It is it's a shift in direction for some time, but we really focus on leveling you up that there'll be access to things like executive coaching to regulatory consulting so that you understand the implications of your work. So it really should be seen as a growth opportunity with a relatively appropriate salary. Like I said, higher than most government scale and the opportunity usually to go back to your institution if it's an academic one. Thanks for watching. If you want to see how fast AI is changing healthcare, definitely check out this video right here and think about subscribing and check out all the great articles on Lifespan.io. I'm Emmett Short. This is Lifespan News and I'll see you in the next one. Cheers.