A View from the CT Foxhole: Brad Ringeisen, Executive Director, Innovative Genomics Institute.

• Author: Cruickshank, Paul

Brad Ringeisen, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Innovative Genomics Institute (IGI). Before his retirement from government service in July 2020, Dr. Ringeisen spent four years at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), most recently in the role of Director of the Biological Technologies Office where he managed a division working at the cutting edges of biology, physical sciences, and engineering. Dr. Ringeisen's office overlapped with IGI on several occasions, on the Safe Genes program, which works to develop safe and more precise genome editing tools while preventing misuse of the technology, as well as IGI's research into innovative solutions to mitigate acute radiation sickness.

Prior to his role at DARPA, Dr. Ringeisen served between 2002 and 2016 as the head of the Bioenergy and Biofabrication Section at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory and spent two years developing point-of-care diagnostics for the Defense Threat Reduction Agency in the early 2010s.

In addition to his deep leadership experience, Dr. Ringeisen is a physical chemist with a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a pioneer in the field of live cell printing.

CTC: Over the course of your career, you've dedicated many years to the application of science to protect and advantage the U.S. warfighter, as well as serve the general public at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, at the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), and at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) as well. What drew you to public service?

Ringeisen: I grew up in a university town; I grew up in Clemson, South Carolina. My father worked for a public school as the chair of the math department at Clemson University. I considered him a public servant as an employee of the state of South Carolina. And so, when I was finishing graduate school, I looked at non-traditional postdocs outside of the academic world. But I'll be honest, I had just had my first child with my wife, and I needed a job. I needed a paycheck. So, it started as a job, and the DoD postdocs paid really well. It also gave me an opportunity to start my career on a strong footing. And it was exciting. I joined a lab that was putting pretty much every piece of biology in front of a laser. Who wouldn't want to do that? It was a great opportunity to explore how to make thin films of biological materials and biosensors, and then we ultimately got into tissue engineering and bio printing. So, it was a really exciting opportunity.

From a broader perspective, the U.S. Naval Research Lab did great science, there's great people there, it had a great mission, and you could basically wake up every day and ask yourself, "What can I do today for the military?" It gave you a mission every single day--help the warfighter, help the soldier--and I really enjoyed that mission. I did it for 15 years of my life, and I wouldn't trade it for anything. Protecting against chemical/biological threats, helping understand traumatic brain injuries, helping soldiers heal better, creating clean energy options for the Navy--these are things that I did on a day-to-day basis. For me, biology and biotechnology for the Department of Defense, it was about helping people. It was about trying to help the environment. That's what we did. And so, I could have done that in an academic lab, but for me, the Department of Defense gave me that umbrella to be able to help guide pursuits. You always had that mission that you were looking for.

CTC: You started at the U.S. Naval Research Lab just prior to 9/11. What impact did those attacks have on your view of the role of science in national security?

Ringeisen: Everything changed. The Naval Research Lab was founded as the first national lab. It was a fundamental, basic science laboratory. There's a bust of Thomas Edison as you drive into the lab. And what he said was, 'We need a lab for the Department of Defense and a national lab that gives you that level of expertise so you can avoid strategic surprise.' Then 9/11 hits. I remember sitting in traffic for six hours trying to get home that day. I remember picking my kids up and driving my wife to West Virginia because the fighter jets were scrambled and flying around D.C. We were all scared. It was an impactful event for all of us.

And then the science changed. It became less about the fundamental basic science, and it became about what can you do right now in Iraq for chemical and biological threats, for Afghanistan for improvised explosive devices and all the brain and the spinal cord injuries. So, we started doing bio-printing for spinal cord repair. We started looking at blood-brain barriers to look at traumatic brain injury. The shift was pretty monumental. It's one of those events, much like COVID-19, where it just changes the trajectory of science. And I don't think the Naval Research Lab has ever really been the same since because people are constantly focusing on this very application-driven research now.

CTC: Can you talk specifically about the Biological Technologies Office (BTO) at DARPA, what it does, and how it developed during your time there?

Ringeisen: I'm really proud of what I did at the Biological Technologies Office. This was an office that was started in 2014. Prior to that, biology at DARPA was kind of hit-or-miss. It was supported by some office directors. It was supported by some program managers. There wasn't a cohesive office to explore what biotechnology could do. [DARPA Director] Arati Prabhakar in 2014 founded the BTO, which I think was a phenomenal idea. The first director [of the BTO] was Dr. Geoff Ling. I still consider Geoff one of my mentors. He's an amazing individual. He served as a military doctor in the Middle East. He has saved lives. Geoff is an amazing person. But when I joined the office in 2016, two years after, they had a scattering of new programs that they had started. It was kind of fits and starts. The number of program managers in the office was dwindling. So, when I came in, it was clear that we had to spend the money, create innovative new programs, and just hire. We needed to hire program managers. I was lucky enough to have a strong network of colleagues that I was able to reach out to and interview and tap to build up the portfolio of program managers that we had in that office. And boy, did they deliver. I am thankful to this day for a group of program managers that I hired. We went from maybe four or five program managers up to, by the time I left, 13 or 14 program managers--allowing us, in my opinion, to pretty much produce as much good science and as many new programs as any office in the agency. And we were one of the smallest budgets in the agency. I think during my tenure there, we pushed out 25 or 26 new programs totaling well over a billion dollars of research dollars. This was really innovative work.

We had four major program areas. We did pandemic prevention, we did warfighter health, we did warfighter performance, and we did something that we called operational biotechnology, which was basically the ability to use synthetic biology or the natural world to protect warfighters, to protect infrastructure, to do bio manufacturing for supply chain stability, and then, what could biology do to potentially provide for soldiers in field-forward situations.

Let me give you a couple flavors of things that we did. We looked at new ways of detecting and diagnosing disease. We invested in DNA and mRNA vaccines. We developed new CRISPR tools. We made foundational investments in things called engineering living materials. I just saw that Biomason went to Series C funding at $65 million; (1) we were some of the initial investors in that company. We discovered rapid ways to find antibodies to protect and treat warfighters exposed to emergent disease. And we did some pretty cool brain machine interfacing; robotic arms with tremendous degrees of freedom, being able to control those prosthetics with just your brain and thoughts alone; some pretty cool stuff. It was a playground of science. It was a sandbox of science across pretty much every possible area of biotechnology, and I found myself lucky to be able to lead it.

CTC: You're currently the executive director of the Innovative Genomics Institute, founded by Nobel Laureate Jennifer Doudna to drive forward scientific research, advance public understanding of genome engineering, and guide the ethical use of these technologies. (2) Could you describe some of the cutting-edge research being done there and the broader work you do?

Ringeisen: Thank you for mentioning the ethical aspect of this work as well, because Jennifer Doudna, who is the founder of this organization, is I think the most inspirational and best scientist in the world. Jennifer founded this institute in part to not just innovate and push the science, but also to push it in an ethical way, an accessible way. We want to lower healthcare costs. We want to expand the accessibility of these technologies to farmers in the world that need them, to populations in the world that need them. It's not just for those that can afford them. That's at the core of what Jennifer and I want to do at the Innovative Genomics Institute.

Now, it's a pretty amazing place as well. I know I just talked about DARPA, but one of the reasons I was attracted to the IGI is we don't just work in human health. Yes, we do tremendous work in human health: We're developing cures for sickle cell disease, for rare genetic diseases; we're looking at ways to affect more complex and common diseases like cancer and neurodegenerative disease. But we're also looking at feeding the world and creating food security and also trying to mitigate climate change and make agriculture more resilient to climate change. And so those are the areas that I'm tremendously excited about, tremendously passionate about, and when I interviewed for this job, Jennifer agreed that these were areas we also...