Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lee Zeldin announced that the HHS’s Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) will spend $144 million on external research grants over five years as part of the Systematic Targeting Of MicroPlastics (STOMP) program.
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The program aims to create a “definitive toolbox” for measuring, researching and affordably removing microplastics and nanoplastics in the human body.
“Microplastics are in every organ we look at—in ourselves and in our children. But we don’t know which ones are harmful or how to remove them,” said Alicia Jackson, ARPA-H Director. Microplastics have been found in human lungs, arterial plaques and brains, and animal studies have shown that their presence can cause disease.
The STOMP program will be led by Ileana Hancu and Shannon Greene, program managers at ARPA-H, and will focus on three technical areas across two phases: measurement and mechanism (phase one) and removal (phase two).
Mapping the “plastome” and understanding biological mechanisms
During the first phase, STOMP performers will design experiments to understand microplastics within the human body. They will also develop gold-standard microplastics measurement methods, including a clinical test that will quantify individual microplastic burden, thus making monitoring and intervention possible at scale. While microplastic accumulation in the human body is a generally shared concern, the extent of accumulation is not agreed upon. This happens mainly because measurement techniques are producing inconsistent results across labs. The CDC will serve as an independent validator of these methods, ensuring the field can trust what it’s measuring.
This work will then produce a risk stratification mechanism for plastic materials—ranking them by biological harm so that scientists, policymakers, and industry share a common answer to the most important question in the field: which microplastics need to be addressed first, most urgently, and in what ways.
These technologies will enable individuals and healthcare providers to detect and reduce potentially harmful microplastics, particularly for vulnerable groups such as pregnant women, children, patients with chronic disease and highly exposed workers. With reliable, broadly available testing methods, public health authorities, regulators and health stakeholders could guide policy, monitor interventions and address health impacts for decades to come, according to the press release.
Submitting research proposals
STOMP is seeking proposals in two technical areas: microplastics measurements and understanding of biological mechanisms. The program anticipates soliciting proposals for microplastics removal after the conclusion of the first 24-month phase.
The project aims to develop high-throughput, automated imaging and chemical identification tools for nanoplastics in complex matrices such as the blood or organ tissue. The goal is to create a clinical test to serve as a standardized, affordable diagnostic tool to be used in hospital settings to provide a microplastic profile for patients. The program also aims to develop calibrated plastic standards to ensure inter-lab consistency in measurements.
With the second technical area, biological mechanisms, STOMP will aim to discover the pharmacokinetics of microplastics in the body: how they move, where they accumulate and how they trigger inflammation or DNA damage. The goal is to visualize the movement of specific polymers across cellular barriers, develop models that rank polymers by toxicity and identify biological pathways that are disrupted by plastic accumulation.
The program is encouraging multidisciplinary teams “with varied technical expertise to submit,” according to the STOMP website. To facilitate team creation, ARPA-H has created a STOMP teaming profiles website where prospective proposers can connect and form teams.
A Proposers’ Day event will be held on April 22, 2026, for the proposer community to learn more about the opportunity and ask questions.
The deadline to submit solution summaries is May 6, 2026, at 5 p.m. ET. After summaries are submitted, proposers will either be encouraged or discouraged from submitting a full proposal. Full proposals are due Monday, June 22, 2026, at 5 p.m. ET. Summaries and proposals can be submitted through the ARPA-H Solutions Portal.
