Philly lost out to Boston as a hub of a new federal health-care research agency, but at least we got a ‘spoke’

ARPA-H, a new federal agency for health-care research, named two regional “hub” offices on Tuesday, including a big northeastern city with a proud colonial heritage and a thriving biotech sector.

Um — sorry, Philly. They went with the other city that meets that description: Boston. (Technically, the ARPA-H office will be in nearby Cambridge, Mass., but really, isn’t it all Patriots country?)

The other new regional hub will be in Dallas, ARPA-H officials said. A third will be in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area, as the agency has announced previously.

Still, Philadelphia will have a supporting role in shaping the direction of ARPA-H, which stands for Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health.

University City Science Center, the nonprofit research incubator complex in West Philadelphia, will serve as a “spoke” for the Dallas hub, which is focused on reducing health disparities.

In that supporting role, the science center will help to identify Philly-area researchers and businesses to develop solutions for various types of health inequities, such as the lack of diversity in clinical trials, said Heath Naquin, the center’s vice president of government and capital engagement.

“This should truly be a regional initiative,” he said. “We will be working with health systems, companies, academic research institutions — all of the above.”

Another Philadelphia connection for the new federal agency was announced last month, when Thomas Jefferson University physician Bon Ku was named an agency program manager for ARPA-H. That means he will identify problems for researchers to solve, though details so far are limited.

Ku, an emergency medicine physician, is a veteran in health-care innovation. At Jefferson, he was director of the university’s health design lab, overseeing research on such topics as reducing the number of alarms in hospital rooms and improving traffic flow in the emergency room.

ARPA-H is modeled after DARPA, the research arm of the Pentagon. It is designed to be agile, delivering solutions for cancer, Alzheimer’s, and other diseases much faster than the National Institutes of Health, which funds research that can span decades.