Biden names first ARPA-H chief amid debates over agency’s identity

Biologist Renee Wegrzyn will take the reins at the new health innovations agency as lawmakers battle over its culture and priorities.

Credit: Ginkgo Bioworks

Launched in March with a US$1 billion budget, ARPA-H aims to shake up the conventional model of funding biomedical research — deemed too slow and conservative in its scope and approach by some critics — by funding high-risk, high-reward research in the life sciences.to emulate the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency

Since leaving DARPA in 2020, Wegrzyn has served as a vice president at Ginkgo Bioworks, a bio-engineering company in Boston, Massachusetts. Ginkgo has not yet announced when Wegrzyn will step down. Lawmakers have been sparring over whether the agency should be housed within the NIH, viewed as a conservative funder of science, or should be independent of it. Although US health secretary Xavier Becerra decided in May that ARPA-H would be part of the NIH, members of Congress are still mulling legislation that would make ARPA-H a completely separate entity from the NIH.

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