Mark Marino, BSPH '11 (MPH), is encouraging new research that attempts to solve the unsolvable. As vice president of VentureWell, a global public health organization and Investor Catalyst Hub for the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), Marino is looking to "spearhead breakthrough solutions across the healthcare industry."
"What if we could make our joints heal themselves?" he asks. "What if we could deliver advanced hospital level care to every rural county in America? What if we had therapies to extend health span, not just life span, and prevent the onset of age-related diseases?"
For over 25 years—from his days as an oft-injured high school athlete to his time in the Peace Corps—health care has been on Marino's mind. We sat down with Marino to talk about what drives and inspires him.
Was there an early moment in life that pushed you toward an interest in health?
I had two shoulder surgeries, a knee surgery, nose surgery, and ankle injuries all before the age of 18. I became fascinated with human physiology and why my body was not designed well for the sports I was playing, so I entered college interested in science and biology. But I had no real career path at the time.
I found my interest in the lab, working on molecular biology and genetic research with Drosophila melanogaster (fruit flies), and I became even more interested in the pathophysiology of disease. This led me to working as a lab technologist in an infectious disease diagnostic laboratory performing enzyme immunoassays for detecting viruses such as HIV, hepatitis B and C, and West Nile virus.
I loved learning about infectious diseases but felt I was on the wrong end of the workflow, diagnosing instead of preventing disease, so that led me to a public health career that began with the Peace Corps.
How did your time in the Peace Corps affect you?
The Peace Corps was formative. I was in Burkina Faso, where I quickly realized social drivers of health were far more important than just genetic risk factors or even clinical care, especially when working in extreme poverty, so my most successful projects were focused on providing comprehensive services that would enable people to utilize health services. This included a microfinance project with a women's group, an income-generating chicken project, and a girls' empowerment program focused on social and emotional support.
After the Peace Corps, when I moved to Baltimore and worked with then Baltimore City Health Commissioner Joshua Sharfstein to establish a Baltimore site for the nonprofit Health Leads, I took the exact same community-driven approaches to addressing health disparities and have been working at the intersection of social impact and health care ever since.
You've been at VentureWell since 2018. That includes the COVID-19 years. That must have been a roller coaster.
Everyone who works in the fields of health care and public health has a COVID story. For me and for VentureWell, the pandemic was transformational. Funded by the NIH, VentureWell served as the commercialization center for the Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics initiative (RADx) and helped coordinate thousands of experts across the world, from industry, government, and academia—including Dr. Yuka Manabe and Dr. Charlotte Gaydos at the Johns Hopkins Center for Innovative Diagnostics for Infectious Diseases—to rapidly speed the development, commercialization, and implementation of technologies for COVID testing. We were able to get the first over-the-counter at-home diagnostic test for COVID in less than a year and have produced over 7 billion COVID tests since 2020.
More importantly, we completely changed the diagnostic industry and showed what is possible. We have taken that same model and developed the first over-the-counter and point-of-care tests for influenza A and B viruses, hepatitis C, and mpox, with more diagnostic breakthroughs on the horizon to address issues like neurological disorders, endometriosis, and multi-cancer detection.
How do you see the field of global health changing in the next five years?
I think we are at an unprecedented intersection of scientific discovery and political protectionism. Where they intersect is the field of global health. The dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development has resulted in the termination of thousands of awards, billions in funding, and layoffs across the global health sector, impacting millions of lives.
The next five years will require a reenvisioning of global health.
During all this uncertainty, there are opportunities. I am seeing a movement toward locally led global health interventions, where solutions are designed and implemented by those closest to the problem, with more partnerships between industry, academia, local government, nongovernmental organizations, and philanthropy aiming to solve grand challenges. And I'm seeing initiatives to help strengthen local infrastructure and resilience so we are better prepared for future infectious disease outbreaks, climate change, and economic disruption.
Posted in Alumni
Tagged public health, alumni