San Antonio helps secure $2.5 billion national biotech hub in Texas
In a major win by local biotech industry leaders, the new federal Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) has established one of its primary hubs in Texas. The Customer Experience Hub will draw together partners from across the nation to strengthen the way research is translated into healthcare solutions.
Being headquartered in Texas is a “game-changer for San Antonio,” says Texas Biomed President/CEO Larry Schlesinger, M.D. It opens doors for increased federal research dollars and new collaborations and bolsters the city’s reputation in healthcare and bioscience innovation on the national stage.
“This puts San Antonio in the same league as the coastal biotech hot spots,” Dr. Schlesinger says. “It will bring unprecedented opportunities to the state and region through the way the hub is set up to generate high-impact science with real-world applications.”
The decision to headquarter one of three ARPA-H hubs in Texas came after significant advocacy efforts led by BioMedSA, the organization dedicated to growing the area’s bioscience and healthcare sectors. Texas Biomed was a key partner in helping make the case that the state is ideally positioned to anchor the hub’s activities.
Heather Hanson,
“We like to call ourselves Military City USA, but we’re also very much the City of Science and Health.”
BioMedSA President
San Antonio has a robust bioscience industry with a history of collaboration. The city boasts the largest military medical presence in the nation, which has helped the science and healthcare industry become the leading local economic generator, with $44 billion in annual impact, according to the Greater San Antonio Chamber of Commerce.
“We like to call ourselves Military City USA, but we’re also very much the City of Science and Health,” says Heather Hanson, President of BioMedSA.
ARPA-H is part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and National Institutes of Health with an independent $2.5 billion budget and unique operating structure to disperse funds quickly.
The overarching goal is to invest in high-risk, high-reward technologies and treatments and bring them to market faster than traditional research and commercial processes achieve on their own. ARPA-H is organized into hubs that connect with other partners as supporting “spokes.” The central hub is in Washington, D.C., a second hub is in Cambridge, Massachusetts and the Customer Experience Hub is at Pegasus Park in Dallas, with San Antonio, Austin and Houston as essential participating spokes.
The Texas hub will drive a human-centered approach to developing and testing new medicines, technologies or programs by involving real people early in the process and ensuring clinical trials reach more diverse and representative groups of patients. By doing so, the program aims to establish trust with communities, improve access to healthcare solutions and ultimately, increase adoption rates of new innovations.
BioMedSA pitched a lengthy proposal to bring the hub to Texas that many local organizations helped craft, including Texas Biomed, UT Health San Antonio, BioBridge Global, Southwest Research Institute, University of Texas at San Antonio, the military and others.
“San Antonio had the most speakers at the in-person proposal pitch event, so the Customer Experience Hub was definitely something that local industry leaders were very excited about and engaged in,” Hanson says. “That’s because San Antonio has the research foundation and the population that is critical to ARPA-H accomplishing its mission.”
San Antonio has one of the largest Hispanic populations in the U.S., which faces unique health challenges. Systems and opportunities already exist to study the health equity and disparity issues that affect the 1 million Hispanics who live here. Significant research and work have been done in the region to address some issues, providing a solid blueprint for ARPA-H grant applicants to follow.
“Whoever is awarded a grant through the program has to keep the customer in mind throughout the process,” Hanson says, “from solicitation announcement all the way through funded project and the outcomes of that.”
Organizations, entrepreneurs and individual researchers from across the nation and even internationally can submit proposals to ARPA-H programs for consideration, typically around key focus areas that ARPA-H identifies. Several proposals from the San Antonio region, including from Texas Biomed, have been submitted. Hanson hinted at the potential for groundbreaking initiatives that could further elevate the city’s healthcare and bioscience ecosystem.
“I will say that several of the proposals are very collaborative,” Hanson says. “Organizations in San Antonio are coming together to propose big things and coordinating with organizations in other regions across the country. Any time that happens it is raising visibility of the overall healthcare and bioscience ecosystem here, so it’s always a really good thing.”