The U.S. government’s Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health has launched a new funding program aimed at the development of autonomous robotics—including a special focus on systems designed to intervene in cases of stroke, as well as a broader remit covering a range of surgical procedures that could potentially be performed without human hands.
The agency, known as ARPA-H, is seeking proposals from organizations with expertise in surgery, imaging and artificial intelligence, including academic and scientific research institutions as well as the private sector—and is encouraging applicants to form multi-disciplinary teams.
ARPA-H, which first launched in late 2022, places stroke as one of the top causes of death and disability in the U.S. The agency further estimates that most people in the country live too far away from properly equipped and staffed centers to undergo the life-saving procedures necessary to remove blood clots from the brain.
Treatment delays can increase the risk of long-term complications, ARPA-H notes, and only about 12% of people in need receive a thrombectomy at all. The deployment of automated neurovascular systems could ultimately help broaden access, the agency figures.
At the same time, for less urgent procedures such as biopsies and kidney stone removals, ARPA-H said the future development of microrobotic systems could deliver less invasive care without specialized equipment.
“We envision care extending beyond the four walls of a clinic to anywhere you can take a container of microbots,” the program’s manager, Ileana Hancu, said in a statement. Hancu joined ARPA-H in 2023 from the National Cancer Institute, where she was a director in the image-guided interventions branch.
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Earlier this year, Stryker and Siemens Healthineers launched a collaboration to develop a neurovascular robot for strokes and brain aneurysms—combining the former’s clot-removing hardware with the latter’s imaging expertise.
Meanwhile, Medtronic tapped the Spain-based software developer Methinks AI to develop programs to spot strokes early and direct clinicians to the appropriate treatment devices.
Johns Hopkins University also showed that an AI-powered robot—trained on videos of previous surgeries—could learn how to perform hands-free tasks during gallbladder removal procedures.
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More recently, this month the robotics developer Sentante showed that its haptic catheter-control system could be used to perform a thrombectomy remotely—with an ocean-spanning telesurgery demonstration connecting participants in Scotland and Florida.
Performed on a human cadaver, an operator at Baptist Health in Jacksonville was able to pull a clot thousands of miles away at the University of Dundee. Sentante’s system received a breakthrough designation from the FDA in September, with the company plotting a 2026 market launch for peripheral interventions.
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Meanwhile, ARPA-H has also begun delivering cash to gene and cell therapy programs, including DNA-editing approaches and in vivo treatments aimed at autoimmune disorders.
The agency saw a change in leadership at the start of this year, with its founding director, Renee Wegrzyn, being removed by the Trump administration.
This week, the Department of Health and Human Services formally announced ARPA-H’s new director, Alicia Jackson, who served as the founder and CEO of Evernow and previously as the deputy director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s biotech office.