FASTPASS: Fast Assessment of Solutions, Therapeutics, Pharmaceuticals, and Supplies

The Problem  

• Drug-related morbidity and mortality cost the U.S. healthcare system $528 billion per year.  
• Drug recalls affect the medication taken by over 150 million Americans each year. Most recalls only happen after patients are exposed to these products.
• FDA inspections keep our medicines safe, but increasing numbers of imports increase our need for tools at the ports to augment this system. Today, only a small percentage of imported drugs are sampled and tested upon arrival at ports – a process that takes weeks.

The Solution  

• The Fast Assessment of Solutions, Therapeutics, Pharmaceuticals, and Supplies (FASTPASS) program aims to protect Americans from harm caused by substandard or contaminated medicines.
• The goal of FASTPASS is to enable sampling of pharmaceutical shipments in minutes, without opening boxes, by building rapid, non-destructive screening tools that can verify drug quality and safety through packaging, in near real-time, at ports, warehouses, and distribution centers.

Only ARPA-H can...  

• Tackle this urgent public health gap that no single agency, manufacturer, or current technology can close alone.
• Achieve a significant technical leap in multiple sensing technologies.
• Partner with early adopters like the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to ensure program successes are implemented at scale.  

FASTPASS has two technical areas:  

TA1 SAMPLE: TA1 performers will develop advanced through-packaging sensing technologies to evaluate the chemical makeup of a product using spectrographic or other non-contact, non-destructive means.  

TA2 DETECT: TA2 performers will develop analytics and models that will transform existing spectroscopic techniques and also address four areas critical to implementing next generation techniques, fully realizing the technological developments in TA1.  

To achieve its goals, FASTPASS encourages collaboration that integrates expertise across the fields of non-contact spectroscopy, artificial intelligence and machine learning, pharmaceutical chemistry, and hardware engineering to enable confident decision support for product quality and safety. This collaboration has led us to host a Proposer Workshop ahead of the ISO release.

Solicitation Notice ID: To Be Announced

The solicitation is expected to be released in mid-August. Once it is released ARPA-H invites interested parties to review the solicitation, which will be posted and maintained on SAM.gov. The solicitation outlines the opportunity and its requirements, key dates and deadlines, submission documents and templates, evaluation criteria for submissions, and information on how to apply.

Proposer Workshop

This is the first of two optional events for the proposer community to learn more about this opportunity, ask questions, and make connections. This event is not intended for patients, patient advocates, the media, or general interest audiences.  

Event date: August 24, 2026

Registration: Required by August 20, 2026 (12:00 PM ET)

Event location: Virtual

Notice ID: ARPA-H-SN-26-157