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What if we could harness the immune system using AI for faster and better critical care?

The Problem
More than 7 million Americans are treated in the intensive care units (ICU) of hospitals each year. Many are critically ill with infections, severe injuries, complications of chronic disease, and other factors that elicit a response from the body’s immune system. The body’s immune response is pivotal in fighting disease; however, when immune and inflammatory responses go into overdrive, these normally beneficial mechanisms can lead to worse health outcomes, such as organ failure and death.

Currently, clinicians lack the tools to accurately track the body’s rapidly changing immune response and therefore cannot intervene precisely or quickly enough to reduce inflammation before it damages organs.
Today's critical care systems often miss opportunities to detect and treat these harmful changes in the immune system because inflammatory and immune responses are notoriously complex and because options to influence the immune system during critical illness are limited.

The Solution
The Critical Illness Immunological Reprogramming and Control Point Learning Engine (CIRCLE) aims to develop new digital twin capabilities to treat critical illness using the latest in AI and diagnostics. This innovation will determine immune system control points that can enable better use of existing immunotherapies as well as next-generation interventions for critical care.

CIRCLE seeks to unlock the ability to track and modulate the body’s immune response on a massive scale, giving clinicians AI-based tools for better diagnosis and care of critically ill patients.

Only ARPA-H can...
Harness the power of American innovation to provide clinicians in the ICU with robust, data-driven tools to save more lives and improve the quality of life after critical illness.

Leverage sophisticated immune system data collection combined with computational technologies to deliver actionable insights and to drive new therapies for life-saving critical care.

Empower the best technical experts to unravel the complexity of the immune system and develop innovative strategies for critical care that could eventually also be used to treat a host of chronic inflammatory conditions beyond critical illness.

Catalyze early integration of commercialization and clinical translation efforts to accelerate the transition of these innovations to intensivists and their critically ill patients.

What ARPA-H needs to solve this problem
CIRCLE seeks teams with expertise in clinical care of critically ill patients, pre-clinical models of critical illness, data platforms, computational modeling, and relevant intervention modalities. Teams may include academic institutions, non-profit organizations, corporate entities, or a combination of highly skilled performers across sectors. The program has three technical areas to be addressed by integrated teams: creating and compiling datasets that characterize the progression and resolution of critical illness in real time; developing patient-specific computational models of their immune systems—called "digital twins"—that can provide reliable and actionable insights into the trajectory of their condition; and testing approaches to leverage these data and insights to modulate the immune system and provide sophisticated, individualized treatment. These efforts are expected to be combined with a robust commercialization plan to ensure rapid translation of CIRCLE’s output to benefit the American public.