The U.S. House of Representatives passes bill to establish a biomedical innovation agency

The U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill to create a new health agency centered on accelerating biomedical innovation in an effort to find innovative mechanisms to detect and treat a range of diseases, including cancer, on Wednesday. The legislation, known as the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Health Act, passed in a vote of 336-85. According to the bill, the agency’s goal is to “foster the development of new, breakthrough capabilities, technologies, systems, and platforms to accelerate innovations in health and medicine that are not being met by Federal programs or private entities.”

The new agency will work to expand “transformative health technologies,” which legislators say would dramatically change the act of detecting, diagnosing, mitigating, preventing, treating, and curing significant diseases and medical conditions. In order to achieve these goals, the bill would guide new institutions to discover and promote new health science advances and develop new analytical techniques to help detect and intervene in diseases early. Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.) said the new project would be a “game-changing health research,” likening it to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which is the agency within the Defense Department that supervises research and development projects.

“Like DARPA, this entity will be focused on producing research on things that frankly may be too risky for the private sector. It’s going to move at a faster pace than the current structure,” Upton said. The Biden administration expressed its support behind the bill earlier this week.