On December 22, 2022 the US Congress tucked a law, the Murray-Burr PREVENT Pandemics Act, into the 2023 omnibus appropriations bill to facilitate new vaccine deployment technology under section 2503 dedicated to Platform Technologies that supports the “development and review of new treatments and countermeasures that use cutting-edge, adaptable platform technologies that can be incorporated or used in more than one drug or biological product.” [1, 2, 3]
This PREVENT Pandemics Act “will also be used to fund a new HHS government agency called ARPA-H (Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health), which was created in 2023 to “take big technical risks that can spark new biomedical breakthroughs” and “revolutionize the detections, diagnosis, mitigation, prevention, treatment and cure of diseases and health conditions.” Both former NIH Director Francis Collins and HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra supported the agency’s creation, and Collins described his vision for ARPA-H as “a DARPA-like culture at NIH.” reports ICAN
DARPA “pursues research and technology where risk and payoff are both very high and where success may provide dramatic advances for traditional military roles and missions and dual-use applications.” [4]
The Act allows for the development of “plug-and-play platform technologies” once FDA crafts the regulatory pathway!