Healthier America: ARPA-H and the Return on Investment for the American People
about the episode
What Is ARPA-H? Dr. Renee Wegrzyn on Health Innovation, Government Funding & the Future of Medicine
In this episode of Innovate and Elevate, Sharon Kedar is joined by Dr. Renee Wegrzyn, the inaugural director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), a government agency designed to drive high-impact health innovations. Appointed by President Biden in 2022, Dr. Wegrzyn shares her deep experience in both synthetic biology and biosecurity, drawing from her work at DARPA, IARPA, and Ginkgo Bioworks.
The conversation dives into the unique role of government in fostering breakthrough technologies, emphasizing ARPA-H’s mission to transform health outcomes. Dr. Wegrzyn explains how ARPA-H takes on ambitious, high-risk projects with the potential to revolutionize healthcare, much like DARPA’s past successes in defense technologies, such as the early development of mRNA technology.
Dr. Wegrzyn highlights ARPA-H’s approach to maximizing the return on investment for American taxpayers by focusing on scalable, impactful solutions that can transition to the private sector. She walks listeners through transformative projects, including NITRO, GLIDE, ADAPT, and POSEIDON.
ARPA-H has a unique Program Management structure, which provides hands-on mentorship and support to ARPA-H grantees. Dr. Wegrzyn identifies how the partnership helps innovators address cost, accessibility, and user experience in health innovations. Sharon and Dr. Wegrzyn also discuss the ARPA-H’s Sprint for Women's Health and how the funding opportunity addresses critical unmet challenges in the women’s health sector.
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“Our mission is to accelerate better health outcomes for everyone. Our ROI isn’t about financial returns — it’s about delivering impactful health innovations that benefit every American.”
About Renee Wegrzyn, PHD
Dr. Renee Wegrzyn is the Inaugural Director of Advanced Research Projects for Health (ARPA-H) as appointed by President Joseph R. Biden. Dr. Wegrzyn comes to ARPA-H with experience working for two of the institutions that inspired the creation of the agency – the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA). Dr. Wegrzyn received the Superior Public Service Medal for her work and contributions at DARPA.
Previously, Dr. Wegrzyn served as a Vice President of Business Development at Ginkgo Bioworks and Head of Innovation at Concentric by Ginkgo, where she focused on applying synthetic biology to outpace infectious diseases – including COVID-19 – through biomanufacturing, vaccine innovation, and biosurveillance of pathogens at scale.
Episode Outline
(01:50) How the US Government Drives Innovation
(04:01) The Return on Investment to Americans
(09:27) ARPA-H Programs and Funding
(12:42) How To Work with ARPA-H
(15:28) The Audacity to Imagine Success
(18:59) Improving Research and the Standard of Care
(21:40) Women’s Health Innovation
(26:45) Beyond Conversation: Embracing Data-Driven Solutions
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Sharon Kedar 00:02
Behind every pioneering idea, method, and device is a fellow human or humans. A trailblazer who is daring enough to ask the questions that push the boundaries and make the impossible possible. I'm Sharon Kedar, co-founder of Northpond Ventures, a multi-billion dollar science-driven venture capital firm, and the host of Innovate and Elevate. In each episode, we'll have candid in-depth conversations with top doctors, scientists, and innovators about leading edge discoveries and how they impact our lives. It's time for all of us to innovate and elevate.
Sharon Kedar 00:38
Welcome Dr. Renee Wegrzyn to the podcast. Dr. Wegrzyn serves as the first director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, ARPA-H, appointed in 2022 by President Biden. Previously, Dr. Wegrzyn served as Vice President of Business Development at Ginkgo Bioworks and Head of Innovation at Concentric by Ginkgo, where she focused on applying synthetic biology to outpace infectious diseases, including COVID-19, through biomanufacturing, vaccine innovation, and biosurveillance of pathogens at scale. Dr. Wegrzyn has experience working for two institutions that inspired the creation of ARPA-H, DARPA and IARPA. At DARPA, Dr. Wegrzyn served as Program Manager where she leveraged synthetic biology and gene editing to enhance biosecurity, support domestic bioeconomy, and thwart bio threats. She received the Superior Public Service Medal for her work and contributions. Dr. Wegrzyn, welcome to the podcast.
Sharon Kedar 01:50
Can you tell us a little bit about what you see as the role of government in innovation and how you are making the impossible possible with ARPA-H?
Dr. Renee Wegrzyn 02:01
Happy to, it's one of my favorite things to talk about. I have so much honor and respect for the model. So like the history lesson when Sputnik was launched, it turns out that the United States, A, didn't know it was coming so it was a huge surprise, and then B, didn't have a counter capability. And so President Eisenhower at the time scrambled and said, okay, we need to launch an agency that can have this autonomy and speed and able to be ultra focused to both create and prevent technological surprise. And so the initial mandates were sort of around space type programs, but eventually much, much broader and led to investments in things like the very early seed investments in the internet and stealth technology, or the materials that were stealthy for stealth technology, and even mRNA.
Dr. Renee Wegrzyn 02:50
So taking some of the early investments the NIH had put forward that were very discovery, curiosity driven to demonstrate, hey, it's actually possible to encode antibodies and antigens and mRNA, but DARPA brought it first to humans and were able to really show that manufacturing. Those examples are really well-known examples about DARPA, but those are some of the unicorns, if you will. But there was thousands of investments that you might have never heard about because either they failed because they were so high risk or maybe had not quite the societal impact, but it's the funding model that allows the funding agency like DARPA, or in our case, ARPA-H to focus on a problem and then look to see what do we need to do today in the next four or five years to demonstrate something that is impossible is now possible and then break that down into the projects, the milestones that we need to reach in a transaction of a three-to-five year program to make that phase shift from impossible to possible. And then our job is done, then things have to graduate out of ARPA-H. We're not a forever funder, it really is to make those initial seed investments.
Sharon Kedar 04:01
Most people don't think about the government having big, hairy, audacious goals and making the kind of impact in innovation that we are talking about. But what I love about hearing you as a leader of ARPA-H is you sort of viscerally understand innovation and from the venture capital and innovator perspective, ideas are crazy, and mRNA seemed off the wall, until they're not. And then everybody takes credit for them, but they can take years. And that's effectively what you're describing, and it sounds like that's what you're doing now applied to health.
Dr. Renee Wegrzyn 04:43
That's right, maybe can I walk you through like one example that, like how we think about this? I'll take our first program that we ever launched as an agency, it's called NITRO, and it was launched by Dr. Ross Uhrich, who's a surgeon. And he did the math and said, okay, as a surgeon, I can have an impact on, maybe in a good career, 2000 patients, knee implants, hip implants for osteoarthritis, or I can have a paradigm shift and have cells that I can inject into a patient's knee even when they're elderly and actually reverse osteoarthritis, restore healthy knees, and not have to go forward with those surgeries that then are, unfortunately you have to have repeated surgeries over time. You don't always have great results. So that was the vision. And so the problem is osteoarthritis and the dollars that are associated with it and the degradation in health for a patient. So how do you then create that technology?
Dr. Renee Wegrzyn 05:36
And what is the problem you're trying to solve? These are the Heilmeier Catechism, as we call it. How's it done today? And then what's new in your approach? So what was new for him was seeing emergent sort of stem cell therapies, engineered biology that you could actually engineer and accelerate cells to be able to direct them to do what you want in terms of bone and cartilage regeneration. So it's complex, you have to do both bone and cartilage. And then what's the impact, what's the dollar impact? But understanding if we could also get this to patients that aren't only the wealthiest patients, but all demographics that could benefit from this, the impact would really be tremendous on their lives as individuals, but also to even our Medicare-Medicaid system. And then it gets really tactical. So how long will it take, how much will it cost? What are the metrics along the way to success?
Dr. Renee Wegrzyn 06:21
And then where government I think can do something really interesting, we've added two questions to DARPAs. So our Heilmeier 9 and 10 are how are you addressing cost, accessibility and user experience? And so going back to the NITRO example, all those put together what the government allows to do, what you didn't hear me say at any point in that, Sharon, is when is my return on financial investment coming back to me? It's a return on investment to the American people. Our dollars that we invest are taxpayer dollars. And so that for us is that return on investment. And it's a very unique lens that unless you're maybe a public benefit corporation, it's a lens that the government can bring to the table and really work for every American, it's such a unique part of what we do.
Sharon Kedar 07:04
I don't think there's anyone who wouldn't love what you said, which is a return on investment for the American people and your dollars that you can allocate are over $4 billion to the future of health and I know that annually, you continue to get additional dollars. And so you talked about for the NITRO program as an example, how long will it take, how much will it cost? If you have any broad strokes thoughts on that, I think personally that's a big part of the power of ARPA-H is that you can fill the gap before something becomes venture fundable on the timeframe and the cost. You can't fill it forever because you have the return on investment to American people, but you can fill it until it's venture fundable.
Dr. Renee Wegrzyn 07:56
That's exactly the sweet spot, I think where we operate, and unlike DARPA that has the Department of Defense, if I make a new weapon system or a new missile, the Department of Defense will pay for it and will actually build it, that doesn't exist for health. The HHS is not picking up, in the case of mRNA, That was Pfizer, it was Moderna, it was for the private sector. And so our lens is always we might be the first funder in, but how do we get those next funders, how do we get venture excited? Because you are our transition community. Behind any program we launch, there's probably 100 or 150 conversations we've had to understand what you're saying, like what is far enough? I use a term a lot called "convincing scale." We have a whole eye transplantation program. And for that program to be successful, three or four whole eye transplantations restoring site is probably the scale that we need.
Dr. Renee Wegrzyn 08:47
But for NITRO, needle-based injections to recover joints, maybe that's thousands of patients to really convince the marketplace that we can now hand that off. And so it is bespoke, it's not a template for every program, but we really take care and make sure that we're hitting something that's ambitious, but achievable. And then usually three or four months after a program manager joins, that's the program announcement, which is a solicitation that says we've identified and formulated this problem that we want to solve. And now, as funders, we are looking and soliciting ideas from the community of how you would solve this. We don't prescribe the how, we just open the space to say, this is it. This is the space we want to innovate in.
Sharon Kedar 09:32
And so unpacking the role of the program manager, I guess there's two questions. So one is like, how many program managers does ARPA-H have? What are the current focus areas? Just for someone who's trying to understand ARPA-H, what does that landscape look like?
Dr. Renee Wegrzyn 09:54
So at ARPA-H, we are really a bottom-up organization. When I first came on board of October of 2022, we didn't have any program managers. So I did set an initial vision on our mission and then also kind of what are our general categories in our portfolio. So our mission is to accelerate better health outcomes for everyone, that ROI for American people. And then the four areas that we do general investment in, where I think there is a space for an ARPA where our investment has a really asymmetrical impact to state of the art is health science future. So 15 years ago this office would've funded mRNA. So what are the platforms of the future? Scalable solutions, so really reaching every American at scale, whether it's manufacturing at scale or being able to reach them in the most rural remote areas, that delivery of care. We have proactive health, it's going to be best if we can keep people from becoming patients in the first place. And then last but not least, resilient systems. And this is the one office that's focused at a systems level at innovation. So a lot of data innovation. We can talk about some really exciting cyber stuff that we have happening there.
Dr. Renee Wegrzyn 10:56
So that's where we started. And then we're like, okay, now I'm going to hire these people who have ideas that we can map to these different categories. And so we have 20 program managers, each of them were hired for a specific topic. We have now 17 programs that are live. Two were announced this week, one yesterday called GLIDE, which is focused on the lymphatic system. So there's actually no FDA-approved drug that has any impact on the lymphatic system as a disease target. And so we want to really create those first-in-class drugs. It's a really challenging area. And that's actually the second program for one of our program managers who last year launched a diagnostics program for lymphatics. So you actually visualize the lymphatics system to then be able to understand, okay, what is the problem, and then now a program to be able to fix it. And then today we launched POSEIDON, which is a cancer screening program. So really trying to push out and democratize multi-cancer screening, but leveraging the tools of synthetic biology to be able to push to earlier stage cancers.
Dr. Renee Wegrzyn 11:53
So the snapshot of ARPA-H, I've given you a couple of examples today, it really is a moment in time. If you whoever five years from now as a director is sitting in this chair talking to you, it should be a totally different suite of programs and that's because we are all term limited. We're here to sprint and me to sprint and launch the agency, the program managers to launch their programs, but we're on term. So the program manager is a three year base term and then another three year renewable term and then they must leave by law. It's written into our congressional statute. I have to leave after eight years. And so I'm first term, four years, second term, so I'm just halfway into my first term. And so that creates this sense of urgency to launch new programs, to find new white space where our investments will really catalyze the state of the art.
Sharon Kedar 12:42
How does someone approach ARPA-H if they're interested in getting funded? I know enough to know that there has to be sponsorship from a program manager, but if someone is listening and they've got some idea that fits within your mandate, how would they think about approaching ARPA-H?
Dr. Renee Wegrzyn 13:04
In the case of each of these programs, you need to find that champion with inside of ARPA-H and that is like the trick to an ARPA is you may have an outstanding idea that would score high in any review, but if you can't find that champion that's also really excited and passionate about it, it may not be successful at ARPA-H. And so the ways to engage are, so first just start to watch the flow of programs coming out of ARPA-H. Our website, we update daily. You can see the types of programs and portfolio that we're investing in. We have a newsletter called ARPA-H Vitals that every two weeks comes out and we list the new announcements, but also upcoming due dates, including due dates to sign up and attend our Proposers' Days. And that is where, if you're excited about POSEIDON, this cancer screening program, or GLIDE, this lymphatic program, you can go listen to the program manager share their vision for what they see that future in 10, 15 years to be, and then how they envision the problem and they want to hear your ideas. What are the solutions that you want to bring to the table?
Dr. Renee Wegrzyn 14:06
And then ultimately, teams can apply and the program managers will create a portfolio and really in a coopetition we like to call it, the teams bring their different solutions and we test those out head-to-head. We may start a program with five teams on day one, but we actually build in a downselect. There's a budget downselect so that by the last phase of a program, there's only two or three teams left. And so that's really in intending that we're continuing to focus our resources where we have the most promise of showing making the impossible possible. And that's really important for teams to know too. We're not like an evergreening grant, there's a performance characteristic. In fact, we call our awardees, we don't call them grantees, we call them performers. They perform the work. And so once a program launches, the program managers are very, very active. The way that you experienced, I'm glad you say this, that we're doers, it's because our program managers are very hands-on, we have a seat at the table making sure that we hit these goals every time.
Sharon Kedar 15:02
eah, and I've met a bunch of them and really see that the coopetition model right now with the Olympics, that's in my head where it's like you end up with two or three, it's like, not everyone gets the medal, but you got to compete for it is what I hear you saying and it's performance-driven, it's outcomes-driven. That is just phenomenal.
Sharon Kedar 15:28
It's just amazing, and again, the pace and the speed and the agility within the government is slightly mind-boggling, not what would be expected. One of my areas just thinking about how we can make the world better, and we do focus on early detection at Northpond, one of the areas that really interests me is early detection. So when you talk about the cancer program, what do you imagine 5, 10, 15 years from now, if we had the audacity to imagine a success, what might that look like?
Dr. Renee Wegrzyn 16:06
Yeah, I love the question. So like the hidden Heilmeier that we ask ourselves when we're thinking of launching a program is, is this a future that I want to live in? And so what does that future look like? And so my mother died from cancer and unfortunately when it was detected, she was already stage three progressing then to stage four. And at that point, your options are just so much more limited, like off the table are sort of some of the nutrition lifestyle things that might really have an impact. And so you're looking at hard choices like radiation, like chemotherapy. And so in a future where we can screen and have the opportunity to intervene where there are less toxic interventions, but also better potential outcomes, I think is so, so important. And I think that if you think about when you go into the doctor's office, I'm actually kind of going through this now. I'm not geriatric yet, but I'm also not pediatric, so they're like you're fine and I'm like, actually, I would like to get a little bit of a more thorough workup.
Sharon Kedar 17:11
Define fine.
Dr. Renee Wegrzyn 17:13
Well exactly, and it's usually like by a little bit of blood work and looking at you. Like there's not these like in-depth screens or tools where something might be amiss that is just not obvious. If it's not obvious, it's really a challenge and when you're much older, you have just so much more attention and interaction with the hospital care and health ecosystem. How do we make that in a future simpler so that when you're at the healthy peak of your life for a normal person, how can we have more of those interventions at home that if there is something that needs attention that we now know not only that we need to go to the doctor, but our doctor also knows, okay, I need to pay attention to this. Like this is actually something a little bit more serious. And we are definitely not there yet as a healthcare system, but I would love that to be a little bit more routine.
Dr. Renee Wegrzyn 18:05
There's also just this huge gap I think as women, and we'll talk about some of those topics, but I interacted when I was having my kids, like constantly when you're pregnant, you're like going in every month and then towards the end of a pregnancy, every week. You have so much attention in there. There's such a deep understanding and a closeness to your body and what's happening. And then you have your kids and you're done and then you go in like once a year. And I'm like, okay, I feel so much more disconnected and there's so much less data being collected by my healthcare providers too. So is that going to impact my standard of care when it gets to the point where I need them again? And I would love to have that kind of continuous data flow where we can really understand. Even baseline to a year ago, I might not yet have a disease, but I might be on the path to unhealthy habits that two or three years from now will lead to disease.
Sharon Kedar 18:59
When you talk about early detection, it seems like when we think broadly about cancer, there's such a disparity when it comes to different cancers and what early detection means. Like for instance, on breast cancer, why do you think we're here?
Dr. Renee Wegrzyn 19:17
Well, first of all, the experience is not great. And so there's fear sometimes that can be associated with that. I dread some of my appointments, I will do it because it's so important. So even in our new Women's Health Sprint, which I know we'll talk about, there's an entire category focused on women's health at home. And so how do you make things in a home setting that you can do it yourself, it's going to be a more comfortable place and setting? You can't do everything, but are there even some sample collections that you could do at home? Are there diagnostics, are there even therapeutics? And then also thinking about what we heard from a lot of women is when you miss appointments, like why is that? It's because I had to travel for my job or I had to do something with my kids and women rarely put their health first. They put everybody else first. And so it's just what a lot of us do. And so how can we, rather than say that's not the right thing to do, how do we empower women where they're at, which is at home? And so there's a lot of different ways you can approach that problem.
Dr. Renee Wegrzyn 20:16
Women's health at home is just one kind of hypothesis. If we can create products that women can use at home, will that help unlock easier paths to some of that care? The other, we actually flag a program ADAPT that we have that does feature breast cancer as one of the indications. And it's really, as we all know unfortunately, tumors do adapt and change the responsiveness to different therapeutics, and over time, that's actually very difficult to manage and bridge the systems biology, like the lab work. We can like deeply, deeply understand what's happening with the tumor and then translate that into changes in the standard of care at a timeline and a pace that actually impacts the patient. And so ADAPT is a really a first-of-its-kind program geared toward bridging the gap between research and standard of care in real time. And as patients' tumors start to change, to use some of the new emergent AI capability to then have better predictions of how they're going to respond to the next therapies and tee those patients up in a very personalized way to what are those therapies that are going to help them, but keep them in a trial. So when you stop responding to a chemotherapy, you'd be dropped from a trial. And so that can be really devastating and feel like starting from scratch when somebody's already facing a cancer. So how do we recreate that experience if you're already in that situation?
Sharon Kedar 21:40
Health is for all humans, it's for humanity. Can we talk about women's health, but if you could just talk about how you launched the women's health effort.
Dr. Renee Wegrzyn 21:53
Yeah, it's important to note that at ARPA-H, we're completely disease agnostic, we're completely technology agnostic. It's just what are places that are really ripe for this type of high-risk, high-impact investment from the government. And so early days, I told you about the mission focus areas that we have, women's health really is part of all of those and I sort of expected that organically we would have some projects in women's health that would just be ideas that our PMs came up with, or that we would get a PM candidate, program manager candidate, from the outside coming in and we just didn't see it. So we saw it in cancer, we saw it in other aspects. And so you reached out, there was a lot of people reaching out, a lot of people have ideas there. I'm like, there's a lot of energy. But for whatever reason, we weren't getting the applications. And so I went to the program manager team and I just said, what do you think about this? And I'm like, I'm a woman. I'm running this agency and it kind of doesn't feel right that we don't have big investments in this area.
Dr. Renee Wegrzyn 22:52
And I had six program managers raise their hand and really agree with that and say, well I'm an expert in lymphatics and there's this really specific topic around women's health and lymphatics that I would love to explore, but it doesn't feel like it's part of my other programs. And so like six stories similar all around the agency. We said we're going to pull these together and behind every ARPA-H project is also sometimes like a business experiment. And so what we had heard in a lot of these circles was small businesses that were really excited. A lot of women CEO-run companies, innovators, saying we will never work with the federal government because you need a PhD in grant writing and three months to write it and I have five people in my company, I just can't do it. And what they do is they pitch venture all the time. So we're like, what if we change the experience so that you have a white paper, we need like a three pager, like what are you actually trying to do, the Heilmeier Questions, and then we'll do a 30 minute pitch to see if we can make a funding decision based on that. So that was our approach with the Sprint for Women's Health.
Dr. Renee Wegrzyn 23:53
Around that time, we started to see a lot of interest from the First Lady in the Women's Health Initiative. So we joined forces because what better amplifier for a little government agency that nobody knows about, but the platform of the White House? And so we are so lucky to be embraced by the entire White House community to help amplify what ARPA-H was doing in this area. And so because of the First Lady's participation, Dr. Biden, so we did a lot of problem formulation. We were lucky enough to have Dr. Biden, Maria Shriver there helping to really shine a light. We had members of Congress of how the model could really be used to uniquely pursue women's health. But what a lot of people don't know is that we actually got to solving those problems and understanding what are the edges of these problems? What are the things that uniquely ARPA-H can pursue? That was one activity among many where we mapped the landscape of women's health and that's where those six topics came from, which are a mix of not only the white spaces, but also the areas that our program managers were passionate about. And so sometimes, the list might look a little strange, everything from new models for women's health, to lymphatics and brain health, to quantitative measurements of pain, but that is really this organic growth from ARPA-H.
Sharon Kedar 25:05
I think that it's going to be, I'm curious what you think, where we really have venture-fundable businesses, which I can't say that we have sort of a plethora of those right now.
Dr. Renee Wegrzyn 25:18
Yeah, and so I love that. It was a perfect setup because our Sprint for Women's Health to kind of dig in a little bit deeper, the way we've set it up is to exactly do what you just said. We have two types of investments: Spark and Launchpad. And the Spark investments are $3 million, kind of demonstrate a proof of concept. Launchpad are $10 million efforts that come with a transition mentor. So we bring in somebody from venture that supports ARPA-H, we have these special partnership agreements that allow us to do that. And in a two year period, we will take a company that has a really great idea or university that wants to create a company, and get it out there at convincing scale in the ecosystem. We're going to give them two years to do that.
Dr. Renee Wegrzyn 26:03
And we're convinced if we can bring some of those companies that are four or five people right now with a great idea, but they haven't been able to get it out into the real world, that that will help unstick that rest of that marketplace. And so we may be the first funders in those companies and those ideas across those topics, but success for us is that we are not the last funder and that we're teeing it up for those venture investments or for philanthropic groups who haven't yet had a focused investment. We're getting a lot of interest from different places in the funding ecosystem. And so that is what we're really trying to demonstrate is a really unique place for ARPA-H to do that.
Sharon Kedar 26:45
My final question is like, where do you think this idea that there's a different bar, because it is the same bar for women's health companies, ever came from?
Dr. Renee Wegrzyn 26:55
It's such a challenging question, but I think that business model is the point. Like, if you're developing a new drug and your drug will work differently in the context of different hormones, you want to know that and you want your drug to work for everybody. And so like including women is good for business. It's good because your product is going to work for more people. It's going to be more readily adopted. It's going to be something that amplifies and moves forward. And to me, it seems so obvious, probably to you too, but I don't think we convince through a conversation anymore. I think we convince through the data that we prove, hey, we can make better drugs if we're actually inclusive. And this actually goes well beyond women too. It goes to minorities and if we're developing tools that are reflective of the actual demographics of disease, they're going to be so much better. One of the things we've been thinking a lot about, especially around AI, the data that's out there.
Dr. Renee Wegrzyn 27:44
you think about some of these tools, whether it's a breast cancer diagnostic or something for cardiology. These AI predictive diagnostics tool, once they get developed, they get developed kind of by companies, probably in a university setting where they have access to a university hospital. And it's just whatever the demographics of that area is the data that you train on. So when these tools are approved and they go out into the real world, the performance degrades almost instantly because now it's dealing with real people. That's bad for business if your tools start to fail when they go out into the real world. And so what are we doing to close that gap, real world data, and then evolution of tools, obviously you can't have a 200 million person trial to roll out your product, but how are we being responsive and sort of always updating the algorithms so that they are relevant as we bring on those new populations I think is also something really, really critical. Again, that brings the business case. You want to be the best performing tool for the longest period of time out there in the ecosystem. And so those are the types of technologies that we're trying to, and business models, that we're trying to push forward.
Sharon Kedar 28:54
Well, I just love that you said we're done convincing with conversation. It's time for data. Could not agree more. Thank you so much for being on the podcast. Thank you so much for what you're doing in the world. It's truly a pleasure to know you. I'm a big fan, a big supporter, and we appreciate you.
Dr. Renee Wegrzyn 29:09
Thank you so much. Thank you for what you're doing. Keep it up.
Sharon Kedar 29:15
Thank you for tuning in. Please connect with me, Sharon Kedar on LinkedIn for additional innovative content. If you enjoyed this episode, please take a moment to like it and don't forget to subscribe to the channel by clicking the button below this video. The views and opinions of the hosts and podcast guests are their own professional opinions and may not represent the views of Northpond Ventures.
About Your Host
Sharon Kedar, CFA, is Co-Founder of Northpond Ventures. Northpond is a multi-billion-dollar science-driven venture capital firm with a portfolio of 60+ companies, along with key academic partnerships at Harvard’s Wyss Institute, MIT’s School of Engineering, and Stanford School of Medicine. Prior to Northpond, Sharon spent 15 years at Sands Capital, where she became their first Chief Financial Officer. Assets under management grew from $1.5 billion to $50 billion over her tenure, achieving more than 30x growth. Sharon is the co-author of two personal finance books for women. Sharon has an MBA from Harvard Business School, a B.A. in Economics from Rice University, and is a CFA charterholder. She lives in the Washington, DC area with her husband, Greg, and their three kids.
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FAQs
What is ARPA-H?
On Innovate & Elevate, Dr. Renee Wegrzyn explains that Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) is a federal agency designed to fund high-risk, high-impact health innovation projects intended to transform healthcare outcomes. ARPA-H was modeled after DARPA’s approach to breakthrough technologies.
Is ARPA-H similar to DARPA?
On Innovate & Elevate, Dr. Renee Wegrzyn explains that ARPA-H was inspired by the DARPA model, which helped accelerate transformative technologies. The conversation explores how a similar framework may help support ambitious projects in health and medicine.
How does ARPA-H fund healthcare innovation?
In this Innovate & Elevate conversation, Dr. Renee Wegrzyn explains that ARPA-H seeks projects capable of creating large-scale impact through bold investments and active collaboration with innovators, researchers, and industry partners.
Why does the government invest in high-risk health research?
On Innovate & Elevate, Dr. Renee Wegrzyn discusses why some breakthrough technologies require long time horizons and risk tolerance that may not fit traditional research or private investment models.
How does ARPA-H choose what to fund?
On Innovate & Elevate, Dr. Renee Wegrzyn explains that ARPA-H uses program managers and outside experts to identify major healthcare problems and develop ambitious initiatives with transformative potential.
What is the Sprint for Women’s Health?
In this Innovate & Elevate discussion, Dr. Renee Wegrzyn discusses ARPA-H initiatives focused on women’s health and innovation gaps. Programs such as the Sprint for Women’s Health aim to address unmet challenges and encourage new solutions.
How can innovators work with ARPA-H?
On Innovate & Elevate, Dr. Renee Wegrzyn explains that ARPA-H actively seeks collaboration with researchers, entrepreneurs, and innovators interested in solving major healthcare challenges.
Why does healthcare innovation need public and private collaboration?
On Innovate & Elevate, Dr. Renee Wegrzyn discusses how partnerships between government, researchers, and industry may help move breakthrough ideas into scalable healthcare solutions.
Why does health innovation matter beyond medicine?
On Innovate & Elevate, Dr. Renee Wegrzyn explains that breakthrough health technologies can influence economic growth, productivity, accessibility, and quality of life beyond healthcare systems alone.