Wellcome Leap’s Regina Dugan: “The odds are irrelevant, if what you’re trying to do is important”

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It took Regina Dugan a decade to figure out which of the many decisions she made while heading the research and development agency of the US Department of Defense would have the greatest effect.

He did not single out the deal to fund a program investigating whether mRNA could be used to make vaccines.

But this research helped create the foundation for highly effective Covid-19 vaccines from BioNTech, Pfizer and Moderna, which harnessed the power of the genetic code to teach the immune system to recognize the virus and ultimately killed off the virus. lockdowns around the world.

“I vividly remember the day I got vaccinated and thought, ‘Wow, I didn’t realize that was the most important decision I’ve made in all my years at Darpa,’ but in fact, it was,” says Dugan, who most later he worked at Google and Facebook.

Dugan recalls how Darpa decided to incubate mRNA technology in 2010. Vaccines that many say accelerated from conception to realization in less than a year were actually based on technology developed much earlier, when few wanted to invest.

“The basic science community said there is no evidence that this works. So they weren’t investing. The commercial sector said. . . we would have to bet on a pandemic once every 100 years.”

But Darpa acknowledged that there was no evidence that mRNA vaccines didn’t work, so his question was: if they did work, would it matter? “That’s the way we think about these programs and issues, we look for the intersection between what we think could be possible and what will make a difference in the world.”

As the pandemic swept across the West in the spring of 2020, Dugan signed up for a new challenge, building Wellcome Leap, a new “moonshot” arm of the Welcome Trust, the charitable foundation dedicated to health research. Taking the global Darpa model, he is orchestrating a network of more than 1 million scientists and engineers charged with delivering breakthroughs he hopes will change the world like mRNA vaccines.

The projects seem disparate but share this intersection between the possible and the important: one is stratifying depression to match patients with the right treatments; another is studying life in the womb to halve stillbirths; and a third is tackling the next challenge for RNA by creating a manufacturing system that makes it accessible worldwide. Wellcome has given Leap nearly $700 million and plans to allocate 5 percent of its total spending, which could take it to $1 billion by 2032.

President Dwight Eisenhower founded Darpa, originally named Arpa, out of fear that the US would be left behind when the Soviet Union became the first to launch an artificial Earth satellite, Sputnik, in 1957. It had what Dugan calls a ” Sputnik moment”: a realization urgent action was needed to pursue breakthroughs.

If you’re working on something that matters, it hurts if you fail, but the only thing that hurts more is working on something you don’t care about.

Dugan says that Wellcome founded Leap with a similar concern about the decline of transformational science, asking, “What if we had a way to accelerate and increase the amount of breakthroughs? What if the way we are doing the work is an impediment to that goal? What if, over time, we have become too risk-averse, perhaps too isolated, perhaps too consensus-driven?

When she was nine years old, Dugan was diagnosed with ovarian cancer and given a 10 percent chance to live. It was 1972, when cancer survival rates were low and chemotherapy was still “very experimental,” he says. His parents did everything they could to get him the latest treatment, including moving from Chicago to Baltimore.

“[The doctors] I told my parents that if they want to give her any chance of survival, she needs to be treated at Johns Hopkins. So my parents moved our entire family so I could get treatment at Johns Hopkins.”

Dugan learned three lessons from his illness. “The first is that the probabilities are irrelevant. If it matters, if what you’re trying to do is important and you see a possibility, take the chance,” he said. “The second thing I learned is that no one is promised tomorrow, so you have to live your life big.”

He starts crying when he tells me the third one, which he learned from his parents. “When I was in the hospital for all those years, when I went to sleep at night, my father was sitting by my bed. And when I woke up in the morning, my mother was sitting there. . . And what I learned from them was that if you want to make a difference in someone’s life, showing up is everything.”

Dugan rejects the myth of the lone scientific genius, in favor of collaboration. In the Wellcome Leap mental health project, biologists are learning from cybersecurity and self-driving car specialists, who can share their insights into model layer types and machine learning for different tasks. This is useful for understanding the complexity of mental health conditions, from genomics to symptoms, to predicting who will benefit from which treatments.

Part of the secret is surprisingly mundane: pre-signed contracts. Once organizations have registered with Wellcome Leap, and more than 100 have, their employees can receive funding and start working in days or weeks, instead of the months it would normally take to launch a project.

Choosing the right program managers is essential. While he’s not a big fan of management books, Dugan is a disciple of Warren Bennis, and his 1998 book Organizing Genius: The Secrets of Creative Collaboration. He praised leaders who were modest but also had the drive to make a difference, which keeps a team of people working toward a common goal. Like Dugan, Leap’s managers tend to stick to all-consuming work. “Most of the people who do this job. . . their grass is not cut and their goldfish are malnourished,” she says.

Projects should have “stretchy but verifiable goals,” so you can tell if they’ve been successful. Leap’s project to create adaptive manufacturing for mRNA, modeled in semiconductor foundries producing multiple products at scale, is scheduled to end late next year. It has two goals: to exponentially increase the number of biologics manufactured each year, while lowering costs and improving access; and create a model for a self-sustaining network of manufacturing facilities that could meet the needs of future pandemics.

Dugan wants more organizations to operate in “Pasteur’s quadrant,” based on the theory expounded by political scientist Donald E Stokes in his 1997 book of the same name. Stokes divides research into four quadrants: one is pure basic research, science for science’s sake; a second is pure applied research, with less ambitious science focused on specific problems. Another Dugan calls “the quadrant of quiet despair,” where many organizations dwell “in the name of risk management.” There is no specific problem or application here and the science is not interesting.

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But in the last quadrant “the science is super ambitious, the problem is very clear. He has a sense of urgency and focuses on it. That’s Pasteur’s quadrant,” says Dugan, referring to French chemist and microbiologist Louis Pasteur, who used this approach to discover the principles of vaccination, microbial fermentation, and pasteurization.

When you “accept the risk. . . Embrace the ambition of science, aggressive schedules, what you do on the human side is fire up your whole team, everyone is doing perhaps their best work. And by doing so, it actually reduces the risk.”

Despite years in the tech industry, Dugan doesn’t subscribe to the fail fast, fail often mantra. Instead, to get out of the doom quadrant, he believes people must learn to listen to that fear of failure.

“If you’re working on something that matters, it hurts if you fail, but the only thing that hurts more is working on something you don’t care about,” she says.

“If you are afraid of failing, if you know that failing is going to suck, it is a sign to you that something is important and that it matters. And over time you can build a muscle to walk towards it instead of away from it. That is what I have chosen to do.”