Emerging Health Innovators

Research
Funding Agency:
Funding Agency
ARPA-H
Awards:
Awards

TBA
Anticipated Funding Amount:
Letter of Intent:
Letter of Intent
Please contact the program director
Limit on Number of Proposals per Organization:
Preliminary Proposal Deadline:
Preliminary Proposal Due Date(s)

To be announced - Solution Summary due 
Submitting a Solution Summary is required to move forward with this opportunity.
Full Proposal Submission Deadline:
Full Proposal Submission Deadline

TBA
Contacts:
Contacts

EHI Program Team

Email: ehi@arpa-h.gov
Description

ARPA-H needs bold vision and creative thinking to solve America’s most pressing biotech and healthcare challenges. Game-changing ideas in healthcare start small—in a lab, a startup, or a young team that lacks critical funding. Currently, there is not an established agency program to develop and mentor early-career researchers. This limits who we reach and who benefits from our programs. Early-career investigators bring fresh perspectives on the front lines of health research but are not as likely to apply for ARPA-H funding opportunities.

This is a notice of an upcoming opportunity. The official solicitation, which will contain complete opportunity details, will be posted to sam.gov by the end of September 2026. 

Proposals for this opportunity must be led by early-career principal investigators (academic, non-profit, industry etc.) within 8 years after completion of their first terminal degree.  

The 2026 cycle will seek proposals across these topic areas:  

  1. Precision Control of Skin Inflammation without Systemic Exposure
  2. Internal Sensing and Targeted Control of Inflammation
  3. Deep Brain Stimulation for Mechanistic Sleep Exploration (Deep Sleep)
  4. CLEAR-MIND — Restoring the Brain's Drainage and Immune Balance to Enable Healing After Injury 
  5. Host-Pathway Interventions for Neurotropic Disease (HIND)
  6. Protecting Patient Data in Life Science AI 
  7. Engineering DRT for Programmable DNA Synthesis as Emerging New Medical Countermeasures (MCM) Strategy
  8. Prevention of Lethal Alpha-gal Allergic Responses Caused by Tick Bites 
  9. SMILE (Smart Microbiome-Informed Lesion & Enamel restoration) 
  10. Ending Preventable Deaths from Ectopic Pregnancy Through First-Visit Diagnosis
  11. Transforming the Well-Woman Exam through Objective Data
  12. Innovations in Biotransport to Support Long-Term Preservation of Tissues and Organs
  13. Organs-in-Action: Next-Generation Human Tissue Platforms for Longevity, Disease, and Therapy Discovery
  14. Near Real-time, Non-contact Determination of Sterility in Distributed Manufacturing Systems
  15. ICAT (In-Cavity Adjuvant Therapy): Implantable Systems for Local Cancer Control at the Resection Margin
  16. Causally-Grounded Alignment for Clinical Generative Artificial Intelligence Tools

If you are interested in this opportunity, or want to learn more, please register for the upcoming Proposers' Day virtual event that will be held on October 13, 2026. Registration for this event is required by October 12, 2026 (11:59pm ET).