ARPA-H announced THRIVE, a program committing up to $160 million over five years to develop custom gene editing therapies for rare genetic pediatric diseases. The agency described THRIVE as designed to accelerate patient-ready treatments by supporting multiple technical approaches, clinical trial designs and deployment models. ARPA-H will fund seven different teams, each facing deadlines for starting clinical trials by year three of the program. The initiative is aligned with ARPA-H’s “moonshot” mandate to move beyond incremental steps and compress the timeline from early development toward clinical testing. The program’s structure blends platform diversity with execution milestones, aiming to ensure that promising approaches reach first-in-human testing. For sponsors, it signals ARPA-H willingness to underwrite both the biology and the operational trial engineering challenges that often stall rare-disease programs. The THRIVE announcement also follows prior U.S. government efforts to increase rare-disease trial throughput, but the scale and gene-editing focus make it a notable funding signal for editing-focused biotechs and academic groups building translational pathways.