[Music] hello thank you for being with us today as a reminder if you will like american sign language interpretation please use gallery view for this meeting closed captioning is not available and we are grateful for the opportunity to work directly with you it is indeed an honor that we don't take lightly last month secretary javier becerra announced a former establishment of the advanced research project agency for health also known as rph as an independent entity within the national institutes of health this new agency will improve the us government's ability to speed biomedical and health research today i am honored to have and introduce to you dr adam russell the new acting deputy director of arpa h he will share the goals and vision of the agency as well as opportunities to get engaged in rpgh groundbreaking work with that i'm going to turn over to you dr russell to talk briefly about your background and what relevant experience you bring to this role welcome thanks marvin it's great to be here please call me adam uh and uh again thanks for the opportunity to come talk to you uh and everybody else uh about this this thing that is becoming real and a chance to share the enthusiasm that i and and the rpg team really are beginning to sort of you know uh take hold of and hopefully will you know continue to make uh real going forward um also an opportunity perhaps to explain a little bit about my background uh which can look a bit like this guy doesn't know what he wants to be when he grows up but i assure you there's a method to the madness so i'm an anthropologist by training uh which to some people out there probably is all they need to know anthropologists are famous for showing up and being in all sorts of places in a good way and doing all kinds of different things which does explain my own resume but looks like again someone who's sort of a jack of all trades touching economics biology sociology neuroscience is actually a key feature of anthropology because that's that's what you have to do that's important to understand uh human systems and behaviors uh and particularly given like the complex interplay of our biology our brains our environments social and physical uh and frankly our uniquely human capabilities to build things like organizations like rbh that can enable us to coordinate on unprecedented scales but but to be honest i didn't want to just understand these systems and behaviors i really wanted to bring that understanding to trying to solve really hard problems that are facing our country uh and in that regard uh in my background i've been fortunate enough to have served not once but twice in different arpas as a program manager uh first at the intelligence advanced research projects activity or irpa where i was given the chance to tackle topics like trust and trustworthiness which are you know critical for for human social behaviors as well as cognitive performance and decision making and then the defense advanced research projects agency or darpa where i spent five and a half years developing again high-risk high payoff programs focused on creating new tools to do the kind of social science we need to really help address complex human challenges like enhancing cooperation reducing conflict and designing more effective organizations uh now the reason that's relevant is both organizations i had the chance to serve under amazing leadership uh a number of incredible folks who really instilled in me that um the best and perhaps the only path to real game-changing success often means you're taking a lot of trips through failure uh because that's what really happens when you're asking new and harder questions uh and they've also taught me that the best way to stay on that path right in spite of the failure is to is through commitment to technical excellence and technical honesty uh solving hard problems last doesn't happen every day so when you think you found that solution you really want to know it's true that it's reputable and it's robust right especially when you're talking about health so that's a kind of model uh business model as it were that i really want to help bring to arpa h and i just i can't believe how incredibly privileged i am to have this opportunity to contribute so you're touching a couple of things right you talked about solving really hard problems you talked about your experience including darpa tell us about how that will shape what you hope to achieve as in our page so again to be here i am the acting deputy director uh and so my my immediate uh job is is to essentially prep this rocket ship for for blast off and uh to make sure that whoever is selected as the inaugural director is able to come in and get to work making the most impact the most good as quickly as possible as they can essentially from day one so as part of that pre-launch effort i see myself as really responsible for for implementing the operational administrative functions uh working with the team we have in place building the team up and and in doing so hopefully helping our page develop and begin to live its own culture that reflects to me the very best parts of an arpa model that is frankly the urgency to undertake ambitious new efforts to solve hard problems that are keeping us from from the better health again guided by this unwavering commitment to technical excellence and technical honesty and i know we jumped right in so i apologize and thank you for reminding me about the acting deputy director so let's take another step back um can you talk about the mission and the approach of our page yes i i think i can uh and and i'm excited to do so um so we started with the idea of arpa h uh being in ambitious place taking on ambitious projects uh so i should probably answer this question by starting with something equally ambitious which is is my interpretation of arpa-h's vision which i i think this is my take is should be that we ultimately want to empower every american to uh to realize their full health potential and again that's my take uh uh nina director may feel differently but i think that issue of empowering is really important because from the empowering aspect of it comes our mission what are we going to do uh we are actually going to find create and accelerate high impact health solutions to well-defined problems and we might talk a little later about what i mean by well-defined problems but but if an arp is successful and it does that it actually also demonstrates what health futures are possible for all you change minds people can suddenly see new ways of new futures uh that ultimately will be better for us all um now the vision itself is crazy ambitious right um we may never get there but that's i think what a vision is supposed to do it's supposed to be your cardinal north uh you get up every day and you keep going after it knowing you won't get there but you may get closer so no that okay that's a good point i want to kind of pick up where you left off can you explain the key elements of the arpa arpa h model yeah uh there are um a lot of people spend a lot of time studying the the particularly the darpa model to try to understand this uh so this will be again my take uh anthropologists are very good about knowing that where he says where you stand but to me the key elements really are uh are the people the processes and the culture um and how you put those in place because those are the things that combine uh to create an organization that is mission driven right getting up every day to get after that mission uh and in the service of the mission is willing and in fact has a mandate to take big technical risks technical risks right to try and solve hard problems in the service of that mission and then as part of that as i started this conversation you have to embrace failure and as a necessary part of achieving that mission uh and if you're not failing regularly you're probably not trying to do hard things um and so you really need to create a space that enables uh people to take those risks and chances to fail uh but also to to inculcate that mentality that failure is how you make progress because we're not just talking about failure for failure sake we're talking about intelligence intelligible failure if we fail we need to know why we need to know whether or not it means that futures close to us or whether there may be other more promising ways to get after that future so again key to being able to embrace that failure is that program managers and other rpg personnel are term limited they are given a certain amount of time a certain tenure to really make a good dent in the universe and so with that time you have you we're giving you lots of resources and all the support you we can give you to try to demonstrate that new health feature in that case because you know your time is clocking out uh you're eager to figure out what what won't work quickly uh so you can move on quickly to what will work yeah and then you talked about program managers and being uh term limited um talk to us about the organizational structure of our page yeah also critical uh right uh so the the goal of the rph uh and what we're putting in place is essentially a very flat organization um ultimately the structure is about empowering right back to that term empowering uh and enabling us to do what we have to to achieve our mission um importantly though a lot of focus is done on program managers and that's appropriate but i actually believe and i think our page's culture will will live this idea that everybody at our page has to be empowered to be an engine of innovation right uh not not just the program managers but also you know how we contract our hr folks our equity folks our entrepreneurship folks uh innovation in all those spaces can have tremendous impact on our ph's ability to you know get things done for the country so all of us at our page need the ability to innovate at what the department of defense calls the speed of relevance and we're peeling back hierarchy to do just that which is why it has to remain flat uh now with other arpas as with other uppers uh you know there are the mission offices which will be probably the more forward-leaning ones that's where the program managers will sit and launch their ambitious programs uh the programs by the way are very important to also understand they have women in tenure uh we don't uh fire and forget uh the program will be started will mature uh and then we'll end um and the goal uh in trying to you know kind of create this urgency and the support system is to give the program managers all the agility they need to make essentially big bets on the part of the american people um now when you're taking a big bet this requires ability to rapidly adapt especially when you're going off into the unknown right the future that many people think is is impossible um so you need to be able to you know end things that don't seem to be panning out you need to be able to sort of you know perhaps manage or or change some things that look promising but aren't quite there and they need to be able to put a lot of resources on things that look like they're really going to get you where you want to get in terms of the solution can you give us an example of what kind of projects arpa age would likely take on or yeah so again i'm acting deputy director just to be clear so i think uh you know the actual uh programs that will come out of the offices will ultimately be the prerogative of the inaugural director and that's appropriate so i'm not hiring program managers and i'm not offering uh hiring mission office directors right now um but i think i think it's it's pretty clear that uh rpgs will have to have a pretty broad portfolio in a sense uh think about all the challenges that are facing us between us and this vision of empowering all americans to realize their their future health potential um but at the same time as i think about all these challenges think about all the opportunities that are out there too right so uh so for example uh the opportunity to use our own bodies to leverage and augment our own body's responses and capabilities so things like using vaccines to fight cancer can we have a universal cancer vaccine that seems crazy but that's part of the vision let's get after that and see see if it's impossible and if it's impossible maybe we can buy that down to just improbable uh other other areas that you know are really promising are things like uh your development of of cheap lightweight um sensors and wearables that will enable again americans to be empowered to detect early onset or impending disease at the individual or possibly even the social level i think it's really important not enough can be said about the new volumes of data that are coming out and the opportunities that they present those data to uh to identify new treatments preventions and allowing us to leverage kind of insights into all kinds of systems from the cells up to the social um to kind of really make you know progress towards his vision here's another example perhaps um while there will be a tendency i'm sure to want us to focus on very particular diseases think about what would it mean if we could empower people to really benefit from the healing power of sleep sleep disturbance is implicated in so many diseases and conditions what if we could find ways to give people back good biological sleep as part of their prevention treatment and recovery uh the the impact could be enormous and that's that's a really hard problem that our base should be in uh and i should also mention it's really important and i think there's a lot of work to be done and uh just as we tackle the big problems making sure that we keep people front and center here right so how do we find new ways to preserve respect uh and ultimately i want to enhance patient privacy and help build the trust in fact harding back to my heart for days the trust is really critical for health to emerge so that's the kind of ambition i think our page should be embracing uh and i'm excited to see this get going that's that's really exciting even though those are just examples i think you can see the promise and kind of the ambitions and the fact that we are going to tackle big problems through through arpa h you mentioned earlier uh a well-defined problem um can you talk more about what does that mean and kind of define that for the audience yeah uh a well-defined problem to me again has three characteristics uh first it's clearly important all right we're back to that high impact question um so so people can understand why this is a problem and why it's important that we tackle it uh it's clearly hard so people can understand why it hasn't been solved yet right and so we can understand the the challenge that's facing us uh and there have to be queer ways to measure progress towards solving that that's really critical um so defining a good problem or a well-defined problem is actually the goal of what we call the hallmark questions um and the hamar questions we'll have to explain that yeah i will i'm happy to um and i will be preaching the sort of the heilmeier gospel going forward because they're they're really a they're an effective tool their series of questions that are unbelievably deceptively difficult they seem intuitive obvious until you try to have to answer them and the the questions again i won't deal together them all but basically get you to focus on you know so what is the problem you're really trying to solve uh and they import they force us to answer uh questions related to things like well how's it done today and what are the limitations right why is it impossible now uh another question is what's new about your idea like why do we think now is the right time to pour on this what's the opportunity um and and highmark question four i think is probably one of the more important ones which is who cares even if you're successful what impact will make uh and to me that's another example rbh has an opportunity to almost evolve in a way in terms of my questions because one one part of that question is also what can you do to ensure the results are equitable um when you're asking the impact you're gonna make if you make an impact in a very small you know area of the market or the world that that that's fine but the impact really comes from the ability to scale and for that to be you know equitably distributed especially uh for people who currently bear a dis disproportionate burden so uh so we really need to focus on the real problem right yeah that will define problem we need to be clear-eyed about why a solution today is impossible how we can potentially prove it could be possible and then what are the checkpoints in terms of making it actual so if impossible to possible to actual and you mentioned the term equity and it's a priority of course the binding-harrison administration is something that the president has emphasized in policy overall i know you've have listened to sessions before can you talk about what you learn about equity and what people are expecting from arpa h from those listening sessions yeah that um thanks very much because uh tons is essentially the takeaway by the way it was a amazing effort from the white house and ostp team to put that together uh which resulted in i think these numbers are right 16 different listing sessions over 250 organizations participating and 5 000 plus folks uh providing their input um and there's a publicly available report i think that captures the details uh uh a little more you know uh that's available for people to read in some more depth and we'll send that out there we'll send that out after this conversation thank you yeah it's worth doing but to me uh what we heard um was first of all that that our page should be a compliment to nih and that makes sense um uh and we can talk a little bit more about our relationship with nih uh if you want later um we heard obviously loud strong this this idea of equity and and couldn't agree more if you uh create a technology that only empowers a few have you really created a solution or are you almost making the problem worse in some cases so i think this this idea of equity is really important and we're going to bake it into our dna um we've heard uh a lot about focusing on again this high high impact problem rather than uh disease focus right um so the idea is can we make you know dense in the universe that have implications for lots of diseases rather than necessarily pouring in on on a single one and we heard very clearly the need to engage with stakeholders early often and i would actually say always in part because we need those stakeholders to help us answer these heilmeier questions uh we may come up with uh the great technical approach but the other questions of who cares what impact and and you know how do you ensure it's equitable that that's going to be all stakeholders to agree um i think we may talk later on as well we we also need stakeholders to help us you know develop well-defined problems yeah and early often and always in terms of stakeholder engagement it was a priority secretary becerra so i'm glad you mentioned that i'm glad you heard that in the that's lucky and you heard in the listening sessions you mentioned the relationship between nih and arpa h can you talk more about that how are you going to work together how are you different yeah so standing up a new arpa is not a trivial thing as it turns out uh and i don't think anybody thought it would be uh but i i guess i should start off by saying like you know the working with nih and rph even now being able to leverage their infrastructure their capabilities or tools has bought us a lot of efficiencies and i think has really cut a lot of time out of what would be necessary otherwise so you know full credit and full kudos to how we've worked with them and and i think we will continue to work with them among other partnerships as we as we get our legs underneath us as a reminder uh marvin uh you know arpa arpa-h is now in a ecosystem it is not the ecosystem and we're very cognizant of that so we are this complement not a supplement or a replacement for uh for anybody else uh and we can say that with confidence because we have a unique mission but it's in the service of what i think is a common vision i mean our age's vision is shared by many which is ultimately empowering americans right to realize their their health potential so nobody in no group can do this work on their own uh and as i mentioned that that includes standing up new organizations definitely takes a team um i think uh the other way to to think about our relationship with with nih well there's some confusion it's not a it's not an institution it's not a center uh i think that confusion to me is actually a signal that i have some work to do to continue to sort of educate and explain the rpg model but i also think it's a positive signal that we really are kind of different right or a different tool in the toolbox and that's exactly how it should be um i think the the other thing to remind us is you know nih is is an outstanding place the the biomedical research they fund is clearly world-class um and i think that is in many ways the feedstock that our page is going to have to use to for our mission you know accelerate high impact uh uh solutions to um to well-defined problems likewise you know we're going to be out there in the edge and we'll you know we're going to essentially i've heard someone say a good arpa should not just see the future should go live in the future so we're gonna go live in the future and we'll be coming back as it were uh to share our results with nih uh things that didn't work that perhaps could could you know help improve their decisions in some cases things that looked promising but weren't ready for solutions um you know who knows i'm really excited about the the collective benefit that we stand to to gain from this uh even while and it's important to emphasize rpg will have its own culture so like darpa and the department of defense uh you know darpa's in the department of defense but it really has its own culture and i see that as a personal responsibility to try to inculcate that culture from day one uh make but but part of that culture is understanding the power of partnerships i mean we we will know that teams go farther when it comes to achieving the bigger vision and in that spirit when you talk about teams i mean how can we engage our page how can the audience uh engage help out ensure that your your your the organization is successful yeah well um i will always take all the help that anybody will offer you me both yeah right that's again uh i think i think you know given the vision where we want to get it would be crazy not to um so as acting deputy director again we are we're we're really just kind of getting started here um we're prepping the ship for blast off but we haven't um so i i want to be careful uh about encouraging people to spend a lot of time writing proposals or writing up ideas to send us now because we wouldn't have the capability really to address them with frankly the seriousness they deserve um and i'm very cognizant of that having been both on side of industry and at other artboards we want to make sure that we can you know give respond and engage with people when we're ready so when the program managers begin to come on board when the mission office directors are stood up you know you'll see more from us in terms of broad agency announcements calls for proposals in the meantime um i think they can help uh by staying excited i mean that enthusiasm we feel it and uh and it drives us forward and reminds us of our responsibility to get this right um i think uh i might also humbly suggest um that uh people can continue to try to understand the arpa-h model and things like the heilmeier questions um it's a it's a really useful intellectual focus and my suspicion is i can't speak for the incoming director uh my suspicion is the helmet questions will inform everything we do every program we'll have to answer them just like every proposal will have to answer the hammer questions so to the extent which people can become familiar with them and start sort of thinking big but rigorously through the hammer questions they'll be better prepped uh to join us when we when we in fact go you know get to blast off and i'm looking forward to working with you to make sure people understand that and know what it entails and and again uh referencing the the the term modern nature of of program managers and personality our page we will always be hiring so uh my my recommendation right now is if you have ideas that you want to send us or they're you know we need the best of the best really right we're trying i'm trying to create a culture that attracts the best people to you know our page um if you know someone out there that you think we should know including yourself reach out to us uh and i think the email is join arpa h nih.gov i presume we can highlight that email yeah we will make sure that we send out that email and also make sure that folks are in contact with my office as well to make sure that again they're getting the most relevant information as we move forward that that'd be great yeah because we want to keep people aware and excited um and so when it's go time you know let's go so i got a couple of quotes here i really like see the future not only see the future but live in the future not my quote stolen but i think it's right yeah in that spirit tell me what's next what's next for our page what's the next steps well what's next for me uh is heads down we're gonna get this thing ready to go so that again the inaugural director can come and do as much good as fast as possible and that's really my focus we're going to continue to build this this culture right to include the people attracting more people getting the processes in place to include operational infrastructure i am going to explain the rph model as widely and to anyone who's willing to listen and then as i said earlier if we do this right we're going to continue to attract the very best to to our mission um whether that's at our page itself as personnel whether it's a performer on a program in the future or as a partner to help us demonstrate i'll go back to the vision help us demonstrate what health futures are possible for all yeah so adam i'll be remiss if i didn't ask you a question that we consistently get in my office in the president's fy 2023 budget he requested 5 billion to ramp up our page can you explain how these funds will be used well if we've learned anything from the arpa model it's that if you want to have a high impact you have to take big bets after all you have to be able and be willing to explore solutions that many if not most other people think are impossible uh so importantly when tackling a well-defined problem uh you don't actually know what a particular solution may end up looking like i mean if you did you wouldn't need an arpa so we talked earlier about the hammer questions well-defined uh problem so once you've got a discipline approach uh for crafting and launching a big program to solve a problem you need to take not just big bets but you need to take lots of them bets on different approaches different teams because you don't know if if any which much less which one could be the solution that you know changes everything uh and that's true across the entire portfolio of rph right given the number of challenges that we'll be tackling that stand between us and our vision we'll have a lot of programs running at any given time um and what's really important is those program managers have to have essentially the ability to do what we call adaptive management right uh they need to be able uh to make lots of decisions about what seems to be promising what what could use some more resources to really get us to the solution and frankly things that aren't working right but taking big bets needs to be well-resourced especially in health right i mean running trials building new to building new tools testing new approaches is never going to be cheap um though between us i hope uh there are a few art page programs that through technical breakthroughs could make them cheaper um which i mean think about the tragedy of having a potentially game-changing solution that could really improve lives that crashes because it just didn't have enough fuel to get off the ground um so you can't be ambitious with your goals but not with the resources that you're wanting to put on achieve those goals not if those goals matter but at the same time of course ambition is not a free pass for recklessness and it's certainly not a free pass for non-accountability uh active mission management is is key to rph's mission uh and by the way as a reminder we count we report directly to the secretary of hhs uh we know their eyes on and that's appropriate um likewise the program managers we will be funding people with uh large amounts of resources and lots of latitude to do work but those program managers will be having eyes on right and everybody will be accountable uh because programmers need again to sort of move resources around quickly shut things down pile into new solutions all by the way while making sure these efforts contribute to the mission and to the director's vision uh so the same by the way will be true of arpa-h as an entire organization because we're constantly testing new things internally as well how can we do contracting better uh are there new hr mechanisms new outreach how do we build a new market how do we build new partnerships um frankly people knowing the resources are in place to enable this kind of adaptivity is going to be key if you have if you only have a penny you become naturally very risk-averse about losing that but if you know that they've got your back financially and resource-wise you're willing to take those bets that i think ultimately will be the ones that help change the world doesn't mean that people won't have to make hard choices they absolutely will there's so many problems to be solved that i don't think it's that we'll have to make those hard choices but i uh but i think you know the the discipline approach hqs combined with you know uh sufficient resources really will allow us to have the kind of rigor we need but the ambition that's required uh to get us to make the best decisions for the for the health of the country wonderful but we covered a lot of ground today uh so before we close any any anything you want to leave us with uh gosh i uh again just just a chance to convey my enthusiasm uh my personal gratitude for having an opportunity to contribute um uh you know i'm always reminded of what we said it rugby that the honor comes not in the selection it comes in the fulfillment of the duty for which you've been selected so uh you know it's been great talking to you but i need to get back to that duty because that's where the honor is um but hey thanks thanks very much your time thank you everyone um and we uh you know we want you down thank you dr russell well thank you adam um thank you for being here with us today y'all uh we know that you have a lot of demands on your time uh we really appreciate you sharing it with us this conversation is the the first of many you heard a lot of information during this discussion but that's just the beginning uh please look out for more of these kinds of discussions with other leaders from across hhs including dr russell i will close this call with my gratitude and look forward to our continued engagement and collaboration in this space thank you all and we'll see you soon [Music] produced by the u.s department of health and human services
Free Discount Prescription Drug Coupons
