Kennedy unveils SPECTRA, an ARPA-H program to make autism diagnosis faster
Why it matters
Families wait months, sometimes years, for an autism evaluation. Kennedy used his Children’s Health Defense keynote to announce a federal research program aimed squarely at that bottleneck.
On September 17, 2026, in his keynote at the Children’s Health Defense conference, Secretary Kennedy announced SPECTRA (Systems for Phenotypic Evaluation, Clinical Trajectories, Response, and Agency), to be run by the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) under program manager Russell Shilling.
Kennedy said today’s diagnostic model is outdated, slow and too dependent on a small number of specialists. The program invites organizations to submit tools and technologies that speed up assessment and improve quality of life for autistic people. No funding amount was announced.
SPECTRA is separate from the NIH’s $50 million Autism Data Science Initiative, which funded 13 projects earlier this year.
Source
AJF reporting.
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