Nine months after it was created by Congress, President Joe Biden’s new agency for high-risk biomedical research has begun to take shape under its first chief, Renee Wegrzyn. The 45-year-old applied biologist is a veteran of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the model for the new agency that, for now, is part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Wegrzyn, who started as director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) on 11 October, has since quintupled the agency’s staff, launched a website and Twitter account, and begun to meet with the many research leaders, legislators, and patient advocates who pushed to create the agency and disagreed over whether it should be independent of NIH.
ARPA-H has also rolled out four “mission focus areas.” They are: creating tools and platforms that cut across diseases, overcoming geographic and manufacturing challenges that keep treatments from reaching patients, crafting preventative health programs, and building resilient health care systems that can handle crises such as pandemics and climate change.
As with DARPA, the heart of the new agency will be its powerful program managers. Each will get $50 million to $150 million to spend on projects they will select, without the strict oversight of peer-review panels. Wegrzyn expects to hire up to 20 program managers by the end of 2023 to begin spending the $1 billion Congress gave ARPA-H to get started.
Wegrzyn says her top priority right now is hiring these program managers. In their applications, they must pitch two ideas and answer some questions developed by former DARPA Director George Heilmeier, such as: What are you trying to do? What is new? Who cares? (The questions are known as the Heilmeier Catechism.)
Although the agency doesn’t yet know where its headquarters will be—some say it should be far from the NIH campus in Bethesda, Maryland—Wegrzyn says program managers won’t have to relocate and can work remotely.
Yesterday, Wegrzyn spoke with ScienceInsider about her plans. This conversation has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.
Q: What are you looking for in the program managers?
A: What’s key is that we have a diverse team not only in demographics, but the topics that they work on. There’s a lot of scope for health, from molecular capabilities all the way to surgeons. But also diverse geographies are important to us. And diverse experiences—government, industry, academia. And they should be risk takers and good collaborators.
Q: Are you getting many applications?
A: Yes, it’s been pretty exciting to see the diversity of responses. Not everybody has seen the Heilmeier questions before. We’re helping coach some of the folks. How do you formulate your concepts, make sure that they’re quantitative? And why ARPA-H? There’s so many other funding organizations out there, we need to really quickly home in on opportunities that are very special for our agency.
Q: You expect to collaborate with NIH on ideas. How will you avoid becoming just another NIH institute?
A: When I was at the DARPA biological sciences office, I worked with NIH all the time because I had a medical countermeasures program. All government stakeholders help their other government partners.
NIH is there to tell us about the science. Would this remove a blocker in your field? And to really make sure that they’re stakeholders in our program because we will also potentially transition successful programs to them.
What’s important is that the program manager will be the decision-maker on whether or not to fund something because they will assume the risk.
Q: You’ve said it could take 5 to 15 years for ARPA-H to have results. So how are you going to convince Congress to increase your budget?
A: We need several examples of programs where you can say, “I get it, there is no other home for that.” Because the goals are so ambitious, whether it’s the magnitude or the timeline.
We also need to demonstrate that we have a culture where there’s an understanding that you will fail, and you should learn from those failures and move on very quickly. Until we have wins, that will be the way that we demonstrate our value.
Q: You’ve already had 30 meetings with members of Congress and met with 10 patient disease groups. It seems like you’re being pulled in a lot of directions.
A: There’s a lot of energy and excitement. … People want us to be successful. Patient communities all want us to share the link to the program manager application with the research communities that care about their diseases.
It’s exhausting to try to build a government agency, I will be the first to say that. But it’s incredibly energizing.