ARPA-H Awards Up to $87 Million for a Program Attempting to Store Living Cell Therapies at Room Temperature Instead of -196°C

ARPA-H Awards Up to $87 Million for a Program Attempting to Store Living Cell Therapies at Room Temperature Instead of -196°C

The U.S. agency ARPA-H has issued contracts under the BioStabilization Systems (BoSS) program: three research teams and an independent verification center will receive up to four years of funding for a "200-degree leap," the ability of cell therapies such as CAR-T to survive storage without deep freezing in liquid nitrogen.

Cell therapies like CAR-T for cancer are a patient's own cells, genetically engineered in a laboratory. From the manufacturing facility to the patient's IV line, they travel at -196°C in liquid nitrogen: a single failure, whether a power outage, a flight delay, or a freezer malfunction, destroys a dose worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Logistics adds $20,000 to $30,000 to each dose and tens of billions of dollars in costs per year; more than 150 million Americans depend on temperature-sensitive therapies, from insulin to cell-based treatments.

"A lost product is a lost life," says ARPA-H program manager Gloria Elliott.

ARPA-H, a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services agency modeled after the military's DARPA, announced the BoSS competition results on September 25: a budget of up to $87 million over four years goes to three teams and an independent verification partner, with the goal of enabling a living cell to withstand room temperature (approximately 21°C) and then resume function. ARPA-H launched the competition in January 2026; the contracts are the outcome of that selection process.

Because certain species survive desiccation without refrigeration, the BoSS developers set out to copy their protective mechanisms. Larvae of the sleeping chironomid Polypedilum vanderplanki can survive nearly 250 days in a dried state at room temperature, owing to the reorganization of intracellular compartments and intrinsically disordered proteins that shield the cell from desiccation damage. Delivering such substances into a cell is a separate challenge: in one experiment, rectangular cells took up large molecules through ultrasound-generated pores more efficiently than cells of other shapes.

The most vivid illustration of this concept is CYBORGEL, a project at the University of California, Davis, led by bioengineer Cheemeng Tan. The team forms a hydrogel, a polymer network, inside the cell that temporarily halts division while keeping the cell functional; Tan calls such a hybrid a "cyborg" cell. A contract worth up to $36.5 million will test whether cells resume normal function after months of storage, first using CAR-T cells for oncology trials, then stem cells for CuRe, a first-of-its-kind prenatal therapy for fetal spina bifida.

"I see this as a challenge shared with space exploration: the farther we want to send living systems, the better we need to protect them in transit," says Tan.

The two other teams: DesiCorp uses AI to identify formulations that slow down cellular metabolism, while Draper Laboratory desiccates cells in droplets under AI-guided control; all three approaches will be independently verified by ATCC, a cell culture biorepository.

BoSS is led by cryobiologist Gloria Elliott, who holds a doctorate in mechanical engineering. She joined ARPA-H in 2025 and also directs a second program, TIGAR, focused on storing donor organs for transplantation without deep freezing.

Elliott describes the core goal as a state of suspended animation in a cell, one that is reversible and preserves viability. This is the same question that cryonics has posed for years about whole organisms, only approached from the opposite end of the temperature scale and at the level of a single cell.