RNAV8 Bio (Renovate Bio) was selected for funding from ARPA-H under the PROPEL program, a one-year pilot of up to $4.4 million aimed at building programmable RNA medicines with controllable expression. The project is led by the Rouskin Lab at Harvard Medical School and the Weissman Lab at MIT/Whitehead Institute, with ARPA-H program manager Shannon Greene, PhD, overseeing the work. RNAV8’s role focuses on the therapeutic format itself, including engineering untranslated regions (UTRs) to turn RNA output into a controllable “dial,” potentially enabling logic-gated expression through small-molecule binding. The effort targets a key translational barrier in RNA therapeutics: reliably connecting sequence and chemistry to what patients receive, beyond predicting protein binding alone. RNAV8 said it will translate discovery outputs into formats aligned with regulatory-ready medicine requirements. If successful, PROPEL could accelerate progress toward next-generation RNA constructs that control where and when gene expression occurs.