ARPA-H Launches New Program to Deliver Rigorous, Gold-Standard Research Faster

WASHINGTON — May 5, 2026 — The Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), an agency within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), today announced the launch of its Intelligent Generator of Research (IGoR) program, a systemic effort to deliver gold-standard biomedical science faster. The program will accelerate breakthroughs with a next-generation, AI-powered research ecosystem built to expand the experimental capabilities available to researchers. Crucially, the system will continuously refine advanced models of complex and chronic health conditions that impose a growing burden on Americans and the U.S. health system.

“We are restoring gold-standard science as the foundation of our biomedical research enterprise,” said HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. “IGoR will strengthen transparency, enforce reproducibility, and accelerate discovery—delivering the evidence we need to Make America Healthy Again.”

The frontiers of biomedical science increasingly confront complex and chronic diseases, such as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, lupus, and other chronic autoimmune conditions. These devastating illnesses affect millions of Americans and involve intricate interactions across molecules, genes, organs, and environmental factors—biology that demands a more adaptive, multifaceted, and systematic research paradigm to truly understand. Yet much of today’s biomedical research still occurs across fragmented, narrowly focused laboratories and disciplines. Research questions are often limited by what expertise, equipment, and collaborators are immediately available. Knowledge moves slowly between fields and results frequently cannot be reproduced—a phenomenon broadly understood as a “replication crisis” across scientific fields. These inefficiencies delay breakthroughs for patients, erode trust in scientific findings, and waste valuable resources.

IGoR aims to combat these challenges with an innovative, AI-enabled ecosystem that can drive biological discovery at least ten times faster than traditional methods. Today, most researchers only have the resources to hunt for breakthroughs in the well-lit corners of science. IGoR allows them to illuminate darker, more complex areas with AI-guided experiments and an agile research marketplace. With this new technology, scientists across medical and biological fields will be able to pursue impactful experiments considered too complex or costly to tackle today – helping supercharge the American research enterprise and reinforce U.S. leadership in biomedical discovery.

“Families shouldn’t wait for breakthroughs while new knowledge trickles through the literature and researchers do experiments that are the most familiar rather than the most informative. Americans deserve science that is transparent, efficient, replicable, rigorous, and worthy of the hope patients place in it,” said ARPA-H Director Alicia Jackson, Ph.D. “With IGoR, ARPA-H will modernize how evidence is generated, shared, and validated—so even research beyond our accelerated science portfolio can deliver breakthroughs in years, not decades.”

Teams working across computational biology, AI and machine learning, experimental science, and lab infrastructure will be selected for funding to support the development of several connected components. First, researchers will create advanced mechanistic models of complex and chronic diseases, along with an AI system that can identify missing information and recommend the best experiments to close knowledge gaps. Teams will then establish a framework for standardized, step-by-step protocols so any qualified lab can replicate experiments to verify outcomes. Finally, they will establish a network of laboratories to carry out those protocols and return high-quality data that will continuously improve the original disease models over time. This approach will drastically improve reproducibility and help address longstanding barriers highlighted by the broader replication crisis in science.

“For centuries, intrepid scientists have discovered amazing insights about health and disease. Yet, as frontier problems become more complex, the speed of discovery has been limited by what information and experimental capabilities are at researchers’ fingertips,” said IGoR Program Manager Paul E. Sheehan, Ph.D. “Through ARPA-H's new IGoR program, we can amplify human creativity by reimagining the research ecosystem and empowering our scientists to answer ever more challenging questions about medicine’s unsolved mysteries.”

The IGoR program will span 5 years. ARPA-H will solicit proposals under its Innovative Solutions Opening (ISO) and encourages collaboration among experts across disciplines to meet the program’s ambitious goals.

At ARPA-H, we are not just funding ideas. We are building the systems that move them forward faster.

For more information, including solicitation details and Proposers’ Day registration for this funding opportunity, visit the IGoR program page.