The Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) announced a new program, Biomedical Data Fabric (BDF) Toolbox, on September 13^th, following the White House’s announcement that described it as a program that will thread together research data across the country to help the scientific community find and share medical insights more easily, to break down data research silos, and deliver health solutions to people more quickly.

“Our goal is to make biomedical research data easier for people to use,” said Jennifer Roberts, Ph.D., director of the ARPA-H Resilient Systems Office. “With the ARPA-H Biomedical Data Fabric Toolbox, we’re increasing the resolution of information that can be shared across the scientific community so that people can get the most from the wide array of existing research to find and share insights more quickly, more precisely, and more comprehensively.”

The goal of creating a BDF Toolbox is to build a unified, consistent layer of data services that can work across many different systems and environments. Such a toolbox will help make research data easier to use, reduce effort for data integration, and enable new capabilities and models that can be applied across disciplines and generalized across disease domains.

“Currently, NCI’s data science activities focus on operationalizing data infrastructure platforms using technologies that are developed incrementally to meet data sharing needs,” said Dr. Erika Kim, PhD, NCI program lead on this effort. “The ARPA-H BDF Toolbox will accelerate the development of prototype technologies to minimize human effort needed to collect and explore data as well as opening opportunities to build a resource that spans a wide variety of health conditions.”

Read the full press release on the ARPA-H website.

ARPA-H has posted a Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) to solicit proposals that cut across clinical and research disciplines. 

The ARPA-H BAA solicitation is listed on their site.

Frederick National Lab (FNL) has posted a Request for Proposals for an integrated Biomedical Data Fabric (BDF) Toolbox capability focused on cancer. 

The ARPA-H BAA and FNL RFP proposals must be received by November 28, 2023.