Biden’s campaign trail promise to cure cancer is hanging in the balance as his plan for a new biomedical research agency is being axed from the Democrats’ social spending package.
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Biden’s campaign trail promise to cure cancer is hanging in the balance as his plan for a new biomedical research agency is being axed from the Democrats’ social spending package.
The proposed Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, ARPA-H, was initially lined up with a $6.5 billion budget for 2022. As ARPA-H went through the House the simmer, the budget was swiftly cut in half to $3 billion in funding.
According Politico sources, the Senate is dropping the entire program from its version of the bill. Democrats are struggling to trim the cost of their massive $3.5 trillion reconciliation package to gain moderates’ support, citing procedural hurdles as the main driver.
Getting the cut from this bill doesn’t mean the project is dead in the water, but it would indicate a loss of momentum just in time for the end-of-year rush.
“It would be tragic if momentum behind ARPA-H slows down,” said Liz Feld, president of the Suzanne Wright Foundation.
Feld is one of many advocates backing an alternative path for turning ARPA-H into a reality. Representatives from Colorado and Michigan are pushing a bill dubbed 21st Century Cures 2.0 to establish the new agency.
The first act was passed five years ago by Congress to speed up the development of medical breakthroughs and encourage more innovation. The $6.3 billion in funding when primarily into the NIH budget to fund programs like Cancer Moonshot, an initiative launched by Biden during his time as vice president in 2016. Cancer is near and dear to his heart as he lost his son to cancer. The initiative intended to accelerate a decade’s worth of cancer research into half the time.
The 2.0 draft legislation features five major titles, the last of which is the establishment of ARPA-H. The bill calls for the original $6.5 billion in funding for the agency. The lead drivers of the bill, U.S. Reps Diana DeGette and Fred Upton, said they will introduce their bill in the coming weeks, hoping it could pass this year.
“The news today that language needed to create ARPA-H has been removed from the Senate version of the reconciliation bill makes our Cures 2.0 bill that much more important—and the need to pass it that much more urgent,” DeGette and Upton said in a statement Friday.
Planned to be housed within the National Institutes of Health, advocates of ARPA-H are gunning for siloed funding for the project to prevent its priorities from being swallowed up in the general budget of the NIH. People close to the discussions say the president is supportive of the NIH housing for ARPA-H, while maintaining the program’s independence.
“The president has made ARPA-H a priority from day one of his administration,” Feld said. “Everything we’ve seen and heard indicates that [DeGette and Upton] have got their foot on the accelerator to get this done before the end of the year.”
