BARDA’s Growing Use of Hubs and Prize Competitions, Beyond SAM.gov

If you’ve been tracking Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) activity solely through SAM.gov, some opportunities may be easy to miss.

Yes, traditional funding and contracting mechanisms, like BAAs and RFPs, continue to be pushed by BARDA – and will continue to do so for some time – but the agency is also making greater use of accelerator hubs, prize competitions, consortia, and other collaborative vehicles to engage innovators earlier and advance technologies aligned with national health security priorities.

These vehicles are not new. What is changing is how actively they are being used as part of BARDA’s broader approach to identifying, developing, validating, and preparing technologies for real-time use.

The BARDA Accelerator Network brings several of these efforts together through five specialized hubs. The Network provides non-dilutive funding, technical support, commercialization guidance, and access to partners for startups developing technologies across key areas of health security. Its recent selection of MedTech Innovator Vantageto lead the Diagnostics and Medical Devices Hub adds another pathway for innovators to engage with BARDA’s broader ecosystem.

The Five Accelerator Hubs

• MedTech Innovator Vantage – Diagnostics and Medical Devices, lead by MedTech Innovator: Supports next-generation diagnostic and medical device platforms that can strengthen detection, response, point-of-care care, and clinical-decision making.
• Paratus – Digital Health, led by MATTER: Supports digital health tools that help people and health systems prepare for and respond to health security threats while improving the continuum of clinical care.
• BioTools Innovator Vanguard – Enabling Technologies, led by BioTools Innovator: Supports drug discovery and development, biomanufacturing innovations that improve speed, capacity, portability and scalability, and tools that strengthen clinical research and care coordination.
• VITAL – Therapeutics and Vaccines, led by Start2 Group, Advise Connect Inspire, LLC, and BioLabs: Supports next-generation therapeutic and vaccine platforms and technologies.
• SPARK – Special Populations, led by Children’s National Hospital: Supports innovations that address challenges in developing and making medical countermeasures available for pediatric populations.

Each hub focuses on a distinct technical area, but they share a common goal: helping promising technologies move from early technical potential toward development, validation, manufacturing, commercialization, and deployment when health security needs arise.

Prize Competitions Create Another Route

BARDA is also using prize competitions to bring a broader range of technical approaches into high-priority development areas.

Unlike a conventional contract or grant, a prize competition can set specific, stage-based technical outcomes and provide awards to multiple teams as they meet defined milestones. This can be particularly useful when BARDA is seeking to expand the pool of potential approaches, encourage teaming, and support innovators at different stages of a development pathway.

Single Shield Prize

A recently opened BARDA prize competition is Single Shield Prize, led by Luminary Labs and focused on advancing single-administration vaccine platforms for pandemic influenza A(H5N1). The competition is structured across three stages: Concept, Nonclinical Proof of Concept, and IND Readiness.

The current Concept Stage has a $32 million prize pool, with up to eight winners eligible for awards of up to $4 million each. Companies, researchers, vaccine developers, and other eligible innovators must submit a Declaration of Intent by January 5, 2027, followed by a Concept Stage submission by January 15, 2027.

The program is designed to encourage approaches that can address the full challenge of a single-administration pandemic influenza vaccine, including immunogenicity, efficacy, safety, scalable manufacturing, and practical deployment.

What This Means for Innovators

These mechanisms can open doors for companies that are scientifically strong but still need to generate data, validate a development hypothesis, sharpen a use case, or establish a path to commercialization.

The goal is not to apply to every BARDA-adjacent opportunity. It is to match your technology’s maturity, evidence needs, technical area, and federal relevance to the appropriate funding vehicle.

The growing use of hubs and prize competitions make early engagement increasingly valuable. Companies should be thinking about their market positioning long before a formal solicitation is released, especially across diagnostics, medical devices, digital health, enabling technologies, therapeutics, vaccines, and medical countermeasures for special populations.

That means looking beyond SAM.gov, developing relationships with relevant ecosystem partners, monitoring hub announcements, and preparing a compelling narrative that connects technical capability to a credible health use case.