Fast Assessment of Solutions, Therapeutics, Pharmaceuticals, and Supplies (FASTPASS)
FASTPASS supports research teams developing through-packaging sensing and analytics to rapidly verify pharmaceutical quality and safety, protecting Americans from substandard or contaminated medicines.
This grant was recently updated
FASTPASS now accepts submissions only from applicants who met previous deadline requirements. The posted solicitation requires a Solution Summary slide deck by September 21, 2026, at 4:00 PM ET to proceed; full proposals are due November 10, 2026, at 4:00 PM ET, and other application details also changed.
Funder: Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health
Due Dates: September 21, 2026 (Solution Summary) | November 10, 2026 (Full Proposal)
Funding Amounts: Phase I duration: 18 months
Summary: FASTPASS supports through-packaging sensing technologies and analytics to rapidly verify pharmaceutical quality and safety without opening packages.
Key Information: Only applicants who met previous deadline requirements may proceed; a Solution Summary presentation slide deck was required.
Description
The Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) runs FASTPASS to protect Americans from substandard or contaminated medicines. The program aims to enable pharmaceutical shipments to be sampled in minutes rather than weeks, using rapid, non-destructive tools that verify product quality and safety through packaging. Its primary use case is high-throughput inspection at ports of entry and other distribution locations, including warehouses and distribution centers.
FASTPASS combines sensing development with analytics and modeling, encouraging collaboration across non-contact spectroscopy, artificial intelligence and machine learning, pharmaceutical chemistry, and hardware engineering. Technologies should support confident decisions about pharmaceutical identity, contamination, degradation, and counterfeit formulations. Partnerships with early adopters such as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration are intended to help successful technologies reach implementation at scale.
