San Antonio’s Biosciences Sector Is Booming
Published Apr 14, 2008
Researchers conduct protein studies at San Antonio’s Greehey Children’s Cancer Research Clinic.
San Antonio is nationally recognized for its arts, culture and entertainment offerings. But increasingly it’s also being hailed as a leader in bioscience.
And it’s no wonder.
The city is home to major military medical treatment and training centers and nationally known research institutions, which are all powerful draws for both established and startup private bioscience companies.
BioMed SA, launched in fall 2005, resides at the heart of the region’s industry. The organization was founded to bring together the industry’s four major sectors: medical and health-care delivery, biomedical research, health professional training, and bioscience firms.
“We want to help sustain and grow the existing industry, attract new companies, help develop workforce talent and help develop financial resources,” says Ann Stevens, president of BioMed SA, a nonprofit industry organization supported in part by the city and county.
The industry’s anchor is the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio. “It’s a research powerhouse that’s in the top 5 percent of all federally funded institutions in the nation,” Stevens says. “It has spawned a lot of activity and growth.”
In December 2007, the Cancer Therapy and Research Center announced that the merger with the UT Health Science Center was approved. The merger comes at an opportune time because, also in November, Texans voted to provide $3 billion in funding for cancer research over the next 10 years. “The consolidation helps us compete for state money as well as federal money,” Stevens says.
San Antonio also leads the way when it comes to military medicine. As part of the military’s Base Realignment and Closure process in 2005, Wilford Hall Medical Center and Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio are consolidating into one entity, the San Antonio Military Medical Center. “We are going to become the largest military medical treatment center in the entire country,” Stevens says. The consolidation is scheduled for completion in 2011.
Brooke, along with Walter Reed Army Military Center in Washington, D.C., already receives the bulk of wounded soldiers from Afghanistan and Iraq. Along with treating the military, San Antonio will become the training site for all military medics, as part of the BRAC process.
To further enhance San Antonio’s importance to the country, the Center for the Intrepid – a state-of-the-art rehabilitation facility for wounded soldiers – opened in January 2007. The $50 million center, built entirely with private donations from 600,000 Americans, serves traumatic amputee patients, burn patients requiring advanced rehabilitation and those requiring limb-salvage efforts.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Dept. of Veterans Affairs has budgeted $67 million for a polytrauma rehabilitation center in San Antonio. Congress has already approved $30 million in construction funding.
What’s more, San Antonio is currently one of five finalists vying to host the Department of Homeland Security’s National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility (NBAF) to research disease-borne health and security threats, including animal diseases and bio-terror agents, and to develop vaccines.
“The reason we’re so well positioned is that San Antonio has a large body of expertise in infectious disease research,” Stevens says. She points to the Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research, which operates the nation’s only privately owned bio-safety Level 4 laboratory.
San Antonio’s health-care and bioscience industry’s economic impact in 2006 was $15.3 billion, with more than $4.4 billion in wages and salaries to 112,762 employees. The industry has added about 22,000 net new jobs over the past decade.
Expect that growth to continue. As America’s seventh-largest city, San Antonio is embracing science and medicine. “At BioMed SA, our role is to bring the story of San Antonio’s expertise to the attention of the nation and the world,” Stevens concludes.
Story by Pam George
Photo by Jeff Adkins
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