Biden turns to biotech for his in­au­gur­al ARPA-H di­rec­tor

Pres­i­dent Joe Biden ear­ly Mon­day un­veiled his in­tent to ap­point Re­nee We­grzyn, VP of busi­ness de­vel­op­ment at Gink­go Bioworks, as the first di­rec­tor of the Ad­vanced Re­search Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), a new NIH-housed agency that looks to fill R&D gaps and go a step fur­ther than the NIH to at­tack riski­er, po­ten­tial­ly more re­ward­ing bio­med­ical in­no­va­tion.

We­grzyn is a prac­ti­cal choice as she’s spent time in in­dus­try and at both of the in­sti­tu­tions that in­spired the cre­ation of ARPA-H – the De­fense Ad­vanced Re­search Projects Agency (DARPA) and In­tel­li­gence Ad­vanced Re­search Projects Ac­tiv­i­ty. At DARPA, she re­ceived a ser­vice medal for her work, and pri­or to that, We­grzyn spent sev­en years at Booz Allen Hamil­ton as a tech­ni­cal and strat­e­gy ad­vi­sor to DARPA, and al­most five years as an ad­vi­sor to the Nu­clear Threat Ini­tia­tive.

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