The Future Perfect 50: Renee Wegrzyn, head of the ARPA-H agency

October 20, 2022:

The way we’ll know whether Renee Wegrzyn can be successful in her new job as the first director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) is if she is allowed to fail.

ARPA-H is a new federal agency focused on biomedical innovation that was made in the image of one of the most secretly successful government organizations in US history: the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. Officially the R&D arm for the US military, DARPA is a unique fusion of government, academic, and industry brainpower, meant to do nothing less than invent the future. Which it has done — beyond plenty of military hardware, like the Predator drone, DARPA has helped seed a range of modern innovations that have little to do with warfare, from GPS to the internet to Moderna’s mRNA Covid-19 vaccines.

All those smarts and a multi-billion-dollar budget go a long way, but what makes DARPA so successful is a willingness to take major risks that may well never pay off — something rarely seen in government bureaucracies. That’s the kind of willingness that ARPA-H — which President Biden set up this year with a budget of $1 billion — must have to succeed.

It helps that Wegrzyn, an applied biologist with experience in cutting-edge biotechnology, knows DARPA from the inside out. She worked there for more than four years, where she was part of its inaugural fellowship class of the emerging leaders in biosecurity initiative. After DARPA, she moved to the synthetic biology company Ginkgo Bioworks, where she became head of innovation at the spinoff Concentric by Gingko, building out the startup’s efforts on biosecurity and advanced diagnostics.

Biosecurity matters to Wegrzyn. As gene editing and writing become easier and easier, synthetic biology may be following the path of computer programming, where it “wasn’t until about 20 years later that the vulnerabilities posed by cyber threats were really recognized,” she told Inside Precision Medicine. If we’re going to protect ourselves against pathogens both natural and engineered — and do so with as little death and social disruption as possible — we need new tools that can passively monitor emerging infectious diseases and new weapons even more effective than the mRNA vaccines that helped curb Covid.

Wegrzyn’s job will be shaping ARPA-H into a force that can do just that. It won’t be easy. As public health expert Ezekiel Emanuel tweeted after Wegrzyn’s appointment, ARPA-H needs to “prioritize health over medicine.” That means taking smart risks in a public health environment that has grown increasingly cautious and ineffective, bringing DARPA’s spirit to a field where the human consequences of failure can be far greater than they are in other technological areas. Wegrzyn will need to fail to succeed, but given what’s at stake, she can’t fail that much.

Source link

tags

Abkhazia Afghanistan Africa Albania Algeria Andorra Angola Antigua and Barbuda Argentina Armenia Australia Austria Azerbaijan Bahamas Bahrain Bangladesh Barbados Belarus Belgium Belize Benin Bolivia Bosnia and Herzegovina Botswana Brazil Bulgaria Burkina Faso Burundi Cambodia Cameroon Canada Cape Verde Central African Republic Chad Chile China Colombia Comoros Costa Rica Croatia Cuba Curacao Cyprus Czech Republic Denmark Djibouti Dominica Dominican Republic East Timor Ecuador Egypt El Salvador Equatorial Guinea Eritrea Estonia Ethiopia Fiji Finland France French Polynesia Gabon Gambia Georgia Germany Ghana Greece Grenada Guam Guatemala Guinea Guyana Haiti Honduras Hong Kong Hungary Iceland India Indonesia Iran Iraq Ireland Israel Italy Jamaica Japan Jordan Kazakhstan Kenya Kiribati Kosovo Kuwait Kyrgyzstan Laos Latvia Lebanon Lesotho Liberia Libya Liechtenstein Lithuania Luxembourg Macau Madagascar Malawi Malaysia Maldives Mali Malta Mauritania Mauritius Mexico Moldova Monaco Mongolia Montenegro Morocco Mozambique Myanmar Namibia Nepal Netherlands New Zealand Nicaragua Niger Nigeria North Korea North Macedonia Northern Cyprus Norway Oman Pakistan Palestine Panama Papua New Guinea Paraguay Peru Philippines Poland Portugal Puerto Rico Qatar Republic of the Congo Romania Russia Rwanda Saint Lucia Samoa San Marino Saudi Arabia Senegal Serbia Sierra Leone Singapore Slovakia Slovenia Solomon Islands Somalia South Korea South Sudan Spain Sri Lanka Sudan Sweden Switzerland Syria Taiwan Tajikistan Tanzania Thailand Togo Tonga Trinidad and Tobago Tunisia Turkey Turkmenistan Uganda UK Ukraine United Arab Emirates Uruguay USA Uzbekistan Vatican City Venezuela Vietnam Western Sahara Yemen Zambia Zimbabwe