Congressman Fred Upton and Congresswoman Diana DeGette this week announced the draft legislation for the Cures 2.0 bill. Upton tells WSJM News Cures 2.0 is the following up to his 2016 21st Century Cures legislation that allocated more funding for medical research and aimed to speed up the approval of new drugs. This new bill compliments that, and also establishes a new federal advanced research agency called ARPA-H.
“President Biden is very much on board,” Upton said. “He’s got a new initiative that was included in his budget called ARPA-H. This is much more concentrated research within the National Institutes of Health. It’s about a $6 billion increase for that.”
Upton says ARPA-H would conduct research into diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s. Under the terms of the proposal, the new ARPA-H would be largely modeled after the military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. Upton says it was DARPA that initially funded Moderna’s M-RNA vaccine technology. He is hoping to get Cures 2.0 approved and signed by President Biden this fall.
