Moonshots and Bold Bets with Renee Wegrzyn

The Other 80

Government systems often take a lot of flack for their (sometimes) built-in inability to take risks and make big bets. So, what would it take to encourage the government to take those big, risky moonshots? For Health, that’s the role of ARPA-H – to fund new ways of improving health by investing in people with big ideas. We sat down with ARPA-H Director Renee Wegrzyn at Aspen Ideas Health to talk about how it’s going and what comes next.

We discuss:

• Why ARPA-H is personal for President Biden.
• How ARPA-H’s special authorities – from flexible hiring to novel contracting – are its secret weapons for speed and scale.
• The critical role of Program Managers – single decision maker driving the vision and execution of each $50-$200 million initiative.

Renee says ARPA-H gives her the ability to direct funds into areas that are sometimes left off the list of “must haves” for innovation:

“...one of the only top down things I've done as a director is said, ‘Why aren't we funding more in women's health? We don't have any program managers in the pipeline that want to exclusively focus on this’. But I think we all inherently understand that women are underrepresented in almost every aspect of health. So I asked our [Program Managers].. who wants to raise [a] hand and pick a topic that is really either unique to women, or is disproportionately affecting women that we can do a sprint and invest around. And so I got six Program Managers to come up with topics, everything from Women's Health at home, to brain health, to understanding and quantifying pain – and through the Investor Catalyst Hub we have worked with investors to understand what kind of convincing scale do we need to get to for you to be the second investor. And we competed this across the country.”

Relevant Links

• About ARPA-H
• ARPA-H Health Equity Factsheet
• The Minor Consult Podcast Episode
• ARPA - H Timeline
• Youtube Conversation with New Yorker writer
• White House FAQ Sheet on ARPA-H

About Our Guest

Dr. Renee Wegrzyn is the first director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), appointed by President Biden on October 11, 2022. Previously, she was the Vice President of Business Development at Ginkgo Bioworks and Head of Innovation at Concentric by Ginkgo, where she focused on synthetic biology for combating infectious diseases like COVID-19.

Wegrzyn has experience with DARPA and IARPA, the models for ARPA-H. At DARPA, she used synthetic biology and gene editing to enhance biosecurity and the bioeconomy, managing programs like Living Foundries, Safe Genes, PREPARE, and DIGET. She received the Superior Public Service Medal for her DARPA work. Her career includes leading biosecurity and gene therapy teams in private industry, developing immunoassays and diagnostics. Wegrzyn has served on various scientific advisory boards, including those for the National Academies and the Air Force Research Labs. She holds a Ph.D. and a bachelor's degree in applied biology from the Georgia Institute of Technology and completed postdoctoral training in Heidelberg, Germany, as an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow.

Source: https://arpa-h.gov/about/people/renee-wegrzyn#:~:text=Dr.,Biden.

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