How Mass. won the "NASA for health care"

Also: This year's COVID vaccine rollout is off to a bumpy start [Donate ❤️]( [View in Browser](  October 3, 2023 Hi CommonHealth reader, Earlier this year, a group of public officials, scientists, business leaders and community advocates held a secret meeting in Cambridge. Federal officials were in town, and this group was on a mission. They had just a few hours to convince the feds to choose Massachusetts as a hub for the [Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health]( or ARPA-H, a new federal initiative to invest in solving big and complex health problems. The pitch they crafted included the state's track record for medical innovation in everything from anesthesia and surgery to COVID vaccines. It was delivered directly by Gov. Maura Healey, researchers, investors and others. Last week, we learned this aggressive strategy paid off. Massachusetts — and specifically, Cambridge’s Kendall Square — will [become one of three hubs]( for ARPA-H. Kendall Square is already recognized nationally as a hotbed of life sciences research. But Brian Johnson, president of the Massachusetts Medical Device Industry Council, said hosting ARPA-H is a big deal. He likened it to landing "what's essentially NASA for health care." Johnson was among a handful of business leaders and state officials — they called themselves the "tiger team" — who worked to win this designation. First, in April, they wrote up a detailed pitch. Then they learned ARPA-H officials wanted to meet in person, and they had just a few days to plan a site visit, in May, that they hoped would seal the deal. "We said Massachusetts has proven time and time again that we have the ability to take early-stage concepts of innovation and commercialize them into global health care solutions," Johnson told me. "The argument was that there is no better place in the world than Kendall Square to house this, because you basically can't walk down the street without bumping into some place or some person who invented some major health care breakthrough," he said. Johnson and others involved in this effort told me they weren’t allowed to discuss it publicly until now — or Massachusetts risked being disqualified. I asked them: Why put so much time and energy into wooing federal officials? The answer has to do with the lofty ambition of ARPA-H. The agency is hiring program managers to distribute big chunks of federal funding to researchers who take on big challenges, from treating cancer and dementia, to making health care more equitable. Program managers will be based in Cambridge. So they’ll be able to see up close the work going on in local research labs. "This is like thinking about trying to put a man on the moon," Massachusetts Secretary of Economic Development Yvonne Hao told me. "This is a very ambitious, inspirational project, and it's going to be headquartered here – which means that if you're someone who wants to think about these problems and work on these problems, you're going to be in Massachusetts." It's still unclear how many ARPA-H jobs will be based in the state, or how much research funding the agency will distribute locally. But that isn’t tempering the excitement of the group that, for a stretch, worked seven days a week to bring the agency here. As Valerie Fleishman, chief innovation officer at the Massachusetts Health & Hospital Association, said: "This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity." P.S.— One of the great things about the CommonHealth newsletter is that it is always available for free. Listeners and readers like you make this possible by giving to support independent journalism. [Please join them](. We need 2,500 new monthly donors by Thursday to reach our goal. 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