Health care coalition throws Houston’s hat in the ring for federal hub site (Galveston: houses)

[SanJac]

This could be a big deal...fingers crossed...

https://www.bizjournals.com/houston/...ate=2023-04-08

Two federal health care hubs are looking for homes across the country, and a Houston coalition is bidding to bring one to the Bayou City.

The group leading Houston’s bid for the customer experience hub is known as the Life Sciences Coalition, and it is spearheaded by the Texas Medical Center and its member institutions. TMC CEO Bill McKeon said the group first met last October and drafted a bid during March. Bids are due in early April, according to TMC officials.

“What NASA did for the space economy, this can do for health care,” McKeon told the Houston Business Journal. “It's a major move by the federal government to advance therapies that normally take a very long time through [the National Institutes for Health] and others — their job is to accelerate that. And they do that by not just money, but finding great ecosystems that can drive discovery, knowledge, commercialization of those products, all the way through clinical trials.”

If Houston is selected for the hub, it would be based in the TMC Helix Park campus, which is opening its first buildings in fall 2023, said Ashley McPhail, TMC’s chief external affairs and administration officer. The Life Sciences Commission had made several trips to Washington to make the city’s case to federal officials, she added.

[ParaguaneroSwag]

It will probably end up in Washington. All federal programs these days are headed there.

[SanJac]

Originally Posted by ParaguaneroSwag

It will probably end up in Washington. All federal programs these days are headed there.

LP is rubbing off on you!!

[atadytic19]

Originally Posted by ParaguaneroSwag

It will probably end up in Washington. All federal programs these days are headed there.

Originally Posted by SanJac

LP is rubbing off on you!!

Lmao, he is not wrong tho.

But outside DC Houston has a good shot.
Agencies love new developments and TMC Helix Park is just the new type of development they love.

Also, many houstonians don't even know that the metro contains one of the 2 National BioDefefense labs.

The Galveston National Laboratory was chose by the NIH to house one if the 2 National Biodefense centers for the US and it houses the LARGEST COLLECTION OF VIRUSES IN THE WORLD!!!

https://www.google.com/amp/s/abc13.c...ines/12818692/

The lab gets hundreds of millions of dollars, more federal funding for research than any other high-containment lab of its kind. It recently received up to $25 million to work with Moderna to develop mRNA vaccines for four deadly viruses, including Ebola.

Houston has the bones to carve a nice niche out in the Biomedical Sciences, but a lot of those $$$ goes to Boston instead (the location of the nation's other Biodefense center). TMC Helix Park and Levit Green is hoping to change that so I know they will make a strong effort to land one of those Federal Healthcare Hubs.

Houston and DFW central locations are a huge plus but the conservative politics in Texas may be a road block.

Houston's future is clean energy, Health Sciences and innovation. The inability to cash in on Biomedical research has obscured just how important TMC is.