Mass General Brigham Selected to Receive $3.29 Million Award from ARPA-H’s Sprint for Women’s Health

Focus is development of a wearable device for women that monitors the brain’s system that clears waste during sleep

Mass General Brigham has been selected by the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) as an awardee of the Sprint for Women’s Health to address critical unmet challenges in women’s health, champion transformative innovations, and tackle health conditions that uniquely or disproportionately affect women. Mass General Brigham will receive $3.29 million in funding over two years through the Sprint for Women’s Health spark track for early-stage research efforts.

Understanding and improving sleep is especially important for women, who face a higher risk of neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s. The NIGHT-Study (Near Infrared Glymphatic Health Tracker Study) team at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), a founding member of the Mass General Brigham healthcare system, is addressing this need by developing the GS-FlexNIRS-EEG, a wearable, wireless device designed for continuous glymphatic system monitoring during sleep at home. The glymphatic system is a network of fluid-filled spaces in the brain that clears waste products and metabolic byproducts. The device uses NIRS (near infrared spectroscopy) to capture critical aspects of this brain clearance, in order to advance early detection of glymphatic dysfunction and lead to personalized interventions for preventing neurodegenerative diseases.

“Being able to create a tool that can monitor this system during sleep in women, especially in the context of menopause and aging, provides a chance to make a real difference in women’s lives,” says Maria Angela Franceschini, PhD, the lead investigator of the study, co-director of the optical imaging group at the Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at MGH and a professor of radiology at Harvard Medical School (HMS). “Unlike costly imaging methods that are available for this purpose, this device provides a key tool to measure sleep quality and brain health, and we hope to make it widely accessible for everyday use.”

Providing women’s health support to the project are Hadine Joffe, MD, MSc, executive director of the Mary Horrigan Connors Center for Women’s Health and Gender Biology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, the other founding member of the Mass General Brigham healthcare system, and Shadab Rahman, PhD, an associate neuroscientist at the Center and assistant professor of medicine in the division of sleep medicine at HMS.

In addition, main contributors are David Salat, PhD, director of the Brain Aging and Dementia Laboratory at the Martinos Center and associate professor of radiology at HMS; Giorgio Bonmassar, PhD, a faculty member at the Martinos Center and associate professor of radiology at HMS; Laura Lewis, PhD, the inaugural Athinoula A. Martinos Professor of Health Sciences and Technology within the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES) and the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and Steven Arnold, MD, translational neurology head and managing director of the Interdisciplinary Brain Center and the inaugural E. Gerald Corrigan, PhD Endowed Chair in Alzheimer's at MGH, and professor of neurology at HMS.

ARPA-H sought solutions within six topics of interest in women’s health and receive an unprecedented response of submissions. ARPA-H launched the Sprint for Women’s Health in February, with First Lady Jill Biden announcing the funding as the first major deliverable from the White House Initiative on Women’s Health Research.

The ARPA-H Sprint for Women’s Health is conducted in collaboration with the Investor Catalyst Hub of ARPANET-H, the agency’s nationwide health innovation network that connects people, innovators, and institutions to accelerate better health outcomes for everyone. Franceshini and her team will work with an ARPA-H Program Manager and the Investor Catalyst Hub over two years to develop their proposed solution, receiving milestone-based payments aligned to research activities and performance objectives.

Press Release: The ARPA-H’s Sprint for Women’s Health Awards

Additional Resources: The ARPA-H Sprint for Women’s Health toolkit