Emory’s antibiotic resistance research to receive funding under Biden’s new ARPA-H DARTS initiative

On Wednesday, September 27, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), through the new Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) announced a new project to combat the growing threat of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Antibiotic resistance causes 1.27 million worldwide deaths yearly, more than HIV and malaria combined, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

To combat this crisis, ARPA-H is funding through its Open Broad Agency Announcement (Open BAA), the Defeating Antibiotic Resistance through Transformative Solutions (DARTS) project. According to a Reuters report, the funding for DARTS will be the new agency’s largest investment to date. DARTS will focus on developing a set of diagnostic and experimental platforms that can reveal insights into how antibiotic resistance starts, search for new antibiotics, and rapidly identify the right antibiotic to prescribe for a particular infection in real-time.

While Harvard Medical School will lead the multi-institution research team under an agreement of up to $104 million, Professor David Weiss, PhD, (Infectious Disease), one of the leaders of the Emory Antibiotic Resistance Center, has been named as the PI of the Emory component of the DARTS grant. His research to better understand heteroresistance has been awarded up to $1.6 million of DARTS funding over the next four years.

Please join us in congratulating Dr. Weiss and his team on this important grant to support their work. For more information about the DARTS initiative under the ARPA-H, please read the full ARPA-H DARTS announcement.  

Earlier this month, the ARPA-H announced that Emory University has been selected as the first recipient of funding to drive groundbreaking health research in a three-year, $24.8 million cooperative agreement. This agreement will drive the development of a cutting-edge programmable approach to prevent, treat and potentially cure diseases such as cancer, autoimmune disorders and infectious diseases. To read more about that announcement, read the full Emory News Center story here.