Geoffrey Ling, MD, PhD is the CEO of Ling and Associates, a biotech and life sciences consulting firm, a Professor and Attending Physician at Johns Hopkins, and a retired U.S. Army Colonel veteran of both Iraq and Afghanistan. As a serial entrepreneur, he has successfully started 6 companies; two of which he was CEO. Of the 6, he successfully exited 3 and the other 3 remain active under private ownership. One exit was a sale of greater than $30M, where he led the concept through to FDA approval; the other 2 were equity deals. One of the companies he was CEO of had achieved commercialization, FDA approval, 120 employees and a $250M valuation when he exited. Additionally, Dr. Ling was the Founding Director of the Biological Technologies Office at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), where he was previously a program manager and Deputy Director of the Defense Sciences Office. He served as the Chair of the Veterans Administration’s National Research Advisory Council and as a Council Member of both the NIH-National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) and NIH-National Institute for Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS). He was detailed by the Dept. of Defense to serve as an Assistant Director in the Science Division of the White House Office of Science, Technology and Policy (OSTP) and co-authored the proposal to create the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H).
The U.S. should create a new non-governmental Innovation Accelerator modeled after the successful In-Q-Tel program to invest in small and mid-cap companies creating technologies that address critical needs of the United States.
An investment of $5 billion over five years will improve U.S. pharmaceutical manufacturing infrastructure.
The federal government can directly address the massive market failures at the center of our healthcare enterprise by establishing a new Health Advanced Research Projects Agency.