The director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) knows the eyes of the nation are on her. Renee Wegrzyn, Ph.D., leads the billion-dollar effort charged with leveraging research advances for real-world impact.

Wegrzyn talked with hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter at Aspen Ideas: Health about the agency’s initiatives, including a $100 million sprint for women’s health and creating tissue-specific delivery of therapies.

“How can we pursue some of these breakthroughs — in our case, for health — by empowering the scientists…the program managers…that have these really big ideas that are so risky that the technical sector, the private sector can’t address because there’s no proof of concept?”

She explained the process: Hire program managers with big ideas in health and give them a time frame to find solutions.

Wegrzyn said the time limit ensures they bring a sense of urgency to solving problems. In return, participants get resources to focus on technical risks.

Many of ARPA-H’s missions are cancer-centered, aimed at issues through what-if questions such as: “What if cancer surgeries were one-and-done?” “What if clinical trials evolved in the same way tumors do?”

She said, “The investments that we’ve made in cancer [include] our precision surgical interventions program. Think about reimagining the operating room suites, when a surgeon is looking into a surgical cavity and trying to remove a tumor.”

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