The Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) has announced up to $158 million in funding over the next five years to support research teams developing new medicines that target the lymphatic system.
Under the Groundbreaking Lymphatic Interventions and Drug Exploration (GLIDE) program, recipients will seek to develop drugs and other interventions for an organ system that has long been neglected by medical science, program manager Kimberley Steele, M.D., Ph.D., said on a March 3 press call.
“It's been an afterthought; it's been underappreciated,” she said. Steele personally dealt with this neglect while navigating her son’s diagnosis with an ultrarare disease that affects the lymphatic system, she added.
No medicines or devices specifically targeting the lymphatic system have been approved by the FDA, according to a March 3 release from ARPA-H.
The experience made Steele put her career on hold to become a special projects director at the Lymphatic Education & Research Network, which she then left to join ARPA-H in November 2023.
“ARPA-H wanted a really tough problem,” Steele said, “and I pitched the lymphatic system as a really tough problem to solve.”
The lymphatic system includes vessels that transport fluids throughout the body. It is tightly connected with the immune system but also interplays with just about every other part of the body, too, and is implicated in causing or worsening heart failure, diabetes, inflammatory bowel disease and numerous other chronic diseases, according to the release.
Steele’s first lymph-focused effort, announced in January, focuses on diagnostics. The goal with GLIDE is to develop new therapeutic and physical interventions.
GLIDE funding recipients “will build the first comprehensive therapeutic toolkit so healthcare providers can treat underlying lymphatic problems early and effectively,” ARPA-H Director Alicia Jackson, Ph.D., said in the agency’s release.
One of the biotech funding recipients is Boston-based Seaport Therapeutics, which will receive up to $15 million in a collaborative project with Australia’s Monash University. The goal is to develop a new oral medicine, derived from Pfizer’s Celebrex (celecoxib) and called GlyphCele, that targets the lymphatic system to treat metabolic diseases and pancreatic cancer.
“The work behind GlyphCele represents an opportunity to address fundamental aspects of disease biology that current treatments overlook,” Seaport co-founder and platform leader Daniel Bonner, Ph.D., said in a March 3 release. “While our internal focus remains on developing neuropsychiatric medicines, we believe the Glyph platform has broad applicability across diseases, and we’re pleased to advance its potential beyond CNS.”
Unlike Seaport, fellow Boston-area biotech and GLIDE beneficiary Ropirio Therapeutics is singularly focused on lymph system work. With its award, Ropirio will work on a drug to prevent lymph vessels from leaking, which causes fluid to build up and tissue to become inflamed. The startup spun out of the Wyss Institute at Harvard University in September 2024.
Leaky vessels are one of the four key problems that can arise in the lymphatic system, Steele highlighted. The other three are blockages, faulty valves and overgrowing lymph nodules, like those experienced by her son.
ARPA-H’s new lymphatic effort was announced on the same day as a $75.8 million program called OCULAB, which seeks to develop tech for continuous blood monitoring through tear ducts. Both follow a $144 million anti-aging initiative unveiled late last month.
The Biden-era program’s new leader Jackson previously told Fierce that her goal is to “win the biotech race” against China by supporting innovative approaches industry would never dare touch due to their risk.