Renee Wegrzyn, Ph.D., the inaugural head of the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), has been let go, a Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) spokesperson confirmed with Fierce Biotech.
“As administrations change, federal agencies’ leadership often changes to align with the incoming president’s priorities,” the HHS spokesperson said in a Feb. 14 email. “Accordingly, Dr. Wegrzyn is no longer the director of ARPA-H.”
The administration has not publicly announced a successor as of publication of this article.
“For the past two and a half years, I have woken up each day with both excitement and a sense of urgency to build a new and transformative capability for the American people,” Wegrzyn said in a Feb. 14 LinkedIn post. “While today started that same way, it ends such that I no longer have the opportunity to serve as the director of ARPA-H.”
The move comes alongside mass firings at the HHS that may include as many as 5,200 probationary workers.
Wegrzyn took the job a few months after the ARPA-H launched in March 2022 with backing from former President Joe Biden and $1 billion from Congress. The funding agency’s coffers rose to $2.5 billion by May 2023, when it announced it had hired its first program managers and was “open for business.”
Wegrzyn had previously worked as a consultant and project manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which ARPA-H is modeled after.
ARPA-H’s mission is to fund high-potential, high-impact biomedical research, according to its website. Such projects also tend to be high-risk, which Wegrzyn acknowledged—and embraced—in a conversation with Fierce Biotech in May 2023.
“We want to fund … the risks that [the private sector and the rest of the federal government] are not willing to take on,” she said at the time.
In February 2024, ARPA-H launched $100 million in funding to study diseases that affect women. The agency has also funded innovative approaches in precision cancer surgery and tumor modeling as part of its support of Biden’s Cancer Moonshot initiative.