Overview
The Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) recently announced the newly approved program for Rare disease AI/ML for Precision Integrated Diagnostics (RAPID). The RAPID program aims to significantly improve outcomes for people with rare diseases by reducing diagnostic delays by ≥50%, decreasing misdiagnosis rates, and expanding access to diagnostics. Beyond benefitting the treatment experience of individuals, RAPID also aims to enable earlier and more accurate rare disease identification to increase clinical trial enrollment and support the discovery of actionable biomarkers for therapeutic development. Overall, RAPID is designed to alleviate the physical, emotional, and financial burdens of prolonged diagnostic uncertainty, ultimately improving the quality of life for people with rare diseases.
Key Focus Areas
ARPA-H is currently soliciting innovative solutions for RAPID across three Technical Areas (TAs):
- TA1: Massive-Scale Rare Disease Dataset – Develop the largest longitudinal dataset of rare disease patient data to support development and validation of algorithms to detect rare diseases at earlier stages.
- TA2: Novel Diagnostic Indicators & Discovery – Utilize cost-effective, remote digital tools to create a multimodal dataset, enabling discovery of novel diagnostic indicators and scalable rare disease detection in undiagnosed populations.
- TA3: AI Diagnostic Development Platform – Build an AI/ML-optimized Rare Disease Data Commons (RDDC) to support interoperable data collection, sharing, and analysis.
Each TA requires a separate proposal, and proposers may apply for multiple areas. TA4 (Effective Deployment & Real-World Validation) will be solicited separately in Phase II, with an Independent Verification & Validation (IV&V) partner providing oversight.
Proposal Submission
The full proposal submission deadline for this opportunity is April 11, 2025, at 5:00 PM EST. ARPA-H anticipates granting multiple awards across the 3 TAs.
If your company has considered applying for ARPA-H funding, your federal funding journey starts here.
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