Last month, the Trump administration issued a letter announcing that the Cambridge arm of the health care research and innovation center funded by Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, or ARPA-H, would be shut down. That arm, known as the Investor Catalyst Hub, helps accelerate health breakthroughs by connecting scientists and entrepreneurs with investors and resources to build on scientific advances made at ARPA-H.
The Cambridge hub, one of three such hubs around the country, includes 715 companies that participate in this program around the country, with 44 based directly out of Cambridge. Member companies include private, public and nonprofit organizations together managed by VentureWell, a nonprofit that supports innovators.
Closing the hub, and weakening federal support for biomedical innovation overall, will “ripple across the entire research ecosystem,” warned Tyler Jacks, president of Break Through Cancer, a cancer research foundation funded by ARPA-H and a member of the hub’s network. “Philanthropy and industry both play critical roles, and organizations like Break Through Cancer are designed to help accelerate discovery, but they are complements to federal funding, not substitutes,” said Jacks.
The letter from the administration is particularly concerning as it did not include a timeline for winding down operations, according to local ARPA-H officials.
However, a source close to ARPA-H who asked not to be identified told Cambridge Day the hub was not shutting down, but the contract with VentureWell was being ended. It was uncleaer how the hub will be managed.
The confusion has been compounded by the fact that last week, the federal government announced major investments for projects through ARPA-H, which will include research teams and companies in the area focusing on lymphatic research and tear biomarkers.
In response to the stop-order communication from the administration last month, local lawmakers, including U.S. Sen. Ed Markey and U.S. Rep. Lori Trahan, sent a letter to President Donald Trump and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr, asking for an explanation for the sudden notice, which also included a stop work order.
“At this stage, terminating the Investor Catalyst Hub’s work would be a profound mistake and a blatant waste of taxpayer dollars and federal investment, especially given that the hub has been fully operational for two years and is already producing clear, tangible returns,” the lawmakers wrote.
Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey has also urged President Donald Trump to “immediately reverse this decision.”
The Investor Catalyst Hub opened in September 2023 under the Biden administration with a goal of scaling up health research. In addition to Cambridge, there are hubs in Dallas and Washington, D.C. In its first year, the hub directed nearly $300 million in research funds to companies and nonprofits in Massachusetts. Projects range from developing technologies for measuring chronic pain to at-home diagnostic tools for women’s health conditions.
One initiative, Sprint for Women’s Health, which includes advancing research on ovarian and brain health, granted the Cambridge hub $100 million announced by former First Lady Jill Biden in February 2024.
“It was a very forward-looking type of innovation, trying to make funding decisions faster and more agile and recognizing that there’s a lot of gaps that can be filled with pieces of science or technology,” said Mariana Matus, co-founder of Biobot Analytics, a wastewater surveillance company that’s part of the hub but has not previously received ARPA-H funding. “It would be a shame if all of that innovation goes away.”
The competitive market in Cambridge, and the Boston area more broadly, for biotech startups and other companies looking for funding means that the elimination of the physical presence of such hubs cuts into opportunities to interact with investors. Currently, the hub runs out of the Cambridge Innovation Center, allowing members to gather, exchanging ideas and resources regularly in the dense biotech cluster of Kendall Square, Cambridge.
“I think it’s important to have a physical presence,” said one company’s founder who wished to remain anonymous out of a concern for influencing future federal funding opportunities. “It’s a big loss not having people on the ground here who can interact with companies, startups, research institutions, hospitals.”
This founder and others also raised concerns about the tolerance for earlier-stage research when such research already has a lower chance of being funded, given the federal landscape for funding more broadly. As of June 2025, about 2,300 National Institutes of Health, or NIH, grants were terminated, and a recent proposal threatens to cut the NIH budget by $18 billion. “Investors don’t want to come in when it’s risky, so that is the whole point of something like ARPA-H, or government funding in general, where they are funding the risky stage of technology or company formation,” said the anonymous founder.
Zoe Beketova is a student in MIT’s Science Writing Program.
This piece originally appeared on Scope, a publication of the Graduate Program in Science Writing at MIT.
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