Meet ARPA-H’s New BREATHE Program and the Leader at the Helm

IWBI sits down with Jessica Green, a longtime pioneering force in cleaner indoor air innovation and the architect of ARPA-H’s new BREATHE program, which is poised to invest millions to support breakthroughs in indoor air quality (IAQ).

Last week, one of the government’s newest independent health agencies, the Advanced Research Project for Health (ARPA-H), launched a new strategic effort to unlock innovation in indoor air quality (IAQ), a program called BREATHE or Building Resilient Environments for Air and Total Health.

It was just two years ago when President Biden signed ARPA-H into law. Like other successful ARPA government efforts in defense and energy, ARPA-H was designed to spur bold thinking and accelerate breakthroughs in human health. Funded by Congress, the agency received $1.5 billion for FY24 to fulfill its mission of “supporting the development of high-impact solutions to society’s most challenging health problems.”

One of those big health challenges taken up by ARPA-H is the question, “What if indoor air was always safe and healthy?”

To tackle that question, six months ago, ARPA-H tapped Jessica Green, who has spent a career leading innovation in IAQ during her time in academia and the private sector. Fourteen years ago, inspired by the impact our buildings can have on human health, Jessica led the launch of the University of Oregon’s Biology and the Built Environment Center. A nuclear engineer and biologist by training, Jessica brought a deep understanding of the complex ecosystem that makes up each of our enclosed buildings, and she set out, through the auspices of the Center, to ensure the time we spend inside buildings was supporting our health rather than potentially hurting it. Under Jessica’s leadership, the Center grew quickly, building a strong track record of teaming up with industry partners, conducting original research, and training a new generation of innovators and practitioners at the architecture-biology interface. From there, Jessica left academia to start Phylagen, a biotechnology company that, among other efforts, worked to monitor the microbiology of air to help advance cleaner indoor air.

Now at ARPA-H, Jessica is leveraging her extensive IAQ expertise and background to launch BREATHE, which will be making a significant investment in IAQ innovation over the next five years. To learn more, I met with Jessica to hear more about her work in healthy buildings and about the BREATHE program.

Q: Can you share a moment in your career that influenced your path to work on healthier buildings and advance innovations in indoor air quality?

I was inspired by G.Z. (Charlie) Brown, author of “Sun, Wind, and Light: Architectural Design Strategies.” Charlie was a pioneer who recognized decades ago the challenges climate change would place on architects to design buildings for greater resiliency. He was concerned that approaches to achieving net-zero carbon, for example tightening the building envelope, might negatively impact human health due to a lack of fresh indoor air. During our tenure at the University of Oregon, Charlie encouraged me to adapt human health molecular diagnostic tools to research how building design and operations impacted indoor microbiology.

Q: Tell us about the origin of the BREATHE program and its novel approach to creating breakthroughs in the future of IAQ.

A century ago, sewer and water treatment systems revolutionized public health. Decades ago, scientific field trials led to national standards for outdoor air quality. Despite these public health triumphs, indoor air is still a major contributor to the spread and exacerbation of illness. The BREATHE program aims to advance indoor air quality technologies and have the same or higher impact that clean water had in reducing water-borne disease and that clean outdoor air had in reducing diseases caused by exposure to air pollution.

Q: What are the three main technical areas of BREATHE and what is the program looking for from potential applicants to the recently announced funding announcement/solicitation?

The BREATHE program will take an interdisciplinary approach to advancing technologies across biosensing, environmental learning models, and indoor air management as part of a comprehensive strategy to create an integrated capability. Below is a brief description of each technical area. More details can be found on the BREATHE program page.

• Indoor Air Biosensors: Autonomously monitor the biological content of indoor air. Emerging technologies, including aerosol capture, molecular diagnostics, and microfluidics will enable the creation of scalable, multiplexed bioaerosol-sensing devices capable of simultaneously detecting dozens of known pathogens and allergens.
• Respiratory Risk Assessment Software: Assess health risks of breathing a wide variety of bioaerosols. Modeling techniques powered by a plethora of data streams including biosensor outputs, health outcome data, outdoor air quality and imagery data (e.g., satellite and street view), occupancy rates, and wastewater surveillance will lead to effective prediction of building occupants’ health risks from exposure to biological components in the indoor air.
• Healthy Building Controls & System Integration: Leverage protective and responsive building interventions to reduce bioaerosol exposure risk at optimal costs. Efficient, real-time, data-driven technologies developed by the program, coupled with optimization analytics, will reduce occupant health risks, and improve indoor air quality by leveraging existing intervention approaches.

Q: Where should people interested in BREATHE go to learn more?

We invite interested experts across industry, academia, and government to join us for Proposer’s Day, which will be held on May 2, 2024, from 8:30am – 5pm PT. The event will be held in-person in Oakland, California and virtually. Advance registration is required.

You can learn more on the BREATHE program page and by reading the news release.