Biden hails new agency aimed at medical innovation

President Joe Biden on Friday hailed the newly launched health research agency, ARPA-H, that Biden says will "drive breakthroughs in biomedicine to prevent, detect and treat diseases, including cancer, Alzheimer's and diabetes.

"Biden proposed the new agency last year but it officially got the green light to launch this week, after Congress authorized $1 billion of funding for ARPA-H for three years in its big government spending bill.

The idea behind ARPA-H is to be a biomedical version of DARPA - the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency that has backed and led to technological breakthroughs like the internet and GPS.