Texas wants to be home to the Biden administration’s new biomedical research agency

A coalition of science advocates wants Texas to completely stake its declare in the biotech world by welcoming the federal authorities’s new biomedical research agency. And it’s waging an aggressive, focused marketing campaign to persuade lawmakers that the state is the agency’s good new home.

Officially established in mid-March, the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, or ARPA-H, is an formidable Biden administration enterprise to pace up biomedical and well being research with $1 billion in funding. While the agency will reside administratively inside the National Institutes of Health, its bodily location is but to be decided.

Enter the Coalition for Health Advancement and Research in Texas, an alliance of hospital programs, research establishments and chambers of commerce devoted to presenting Texas as the best choice for the federal authorities’s new biotech arm.

The coalition created an in depth choose-your-own-adventure plan for ARPA-H that presents the advantages of every main metropolis in the Lone Star State, in addition to proposed constructing websites and institutional companions.

Dallas factors to biotech hub Pegasus Park and research large UT Southwestern in its pitch to home the agency.

“This is a really terrific opportunity to take a leap forward in breakthrough science research, and we want to be part of it,” stated Thomas Graham, coalition spokesperson and CEO and president of Crosswind Media and Public Relations in Austin.

“The concept is that we want to demonstrate to the Biden administration and to members of Congress, the appropriators, that Texas is the best place for this agency. If you’re going to do it, it should be done in Texas.”

The basis of ARPA-H in North Texas would function yet one more funding in the space’s decades-long push to grow to be a biotech behemoth. Already, Dallas-Fort Worth claims greater than 60 biotech and life sciences firms and a number of other distinguished research universities.

Pegasus Park’s sprawling 23-acre campus, beforehand home to Mobil Corp., boasts a biotech-specific hub anchored by BioLabs, a coworking lab house firm designed to assist launch and increase different rising firms.

In its argument for Dallas, the Coalition for Health Advancement and Research in Texas highlights Pegasus Park’s central location, lower than one mile from the UT Southwestern Medical District, 9 minutes from downtown Dallas, and fewer than 20 minutes from each Dallas Love Field and Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport.

“There is space there that, if the Biden administration chose to locate it in Dallas, this space is ready to move in. Same thing in Houston, same thing in San Antonio, same thing in Austin – there are places that are ready to move,” Graham stated. “All they’ve got to say is ‘Yeah, we like this idea.’”

Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson put his endorsement behind the mission, as did Dallas Rep. Colin Allred. ARPA-H, Allred stated, has the potential to catapult the nation’s well being discoveries to a new degree, a risk that North Texas wants to help.

“We cannot get left behind as other nations invest in this kind of vital research,” Allred stated in an announcement. “We have seen this model can succeed with the Defense Department’s similar agency, so let’s put North Texas’ best and brightest minds in biotech research to work solving our health care problems.”

North Texas not solely has the house to home such a large endeavor, however the individuals to help it, as properly. Students in the space accomplished almost 53,000 science, know-how, engineering and math-related levels in 2020, the coalition reported. In 2019, Nature Index, a database for research articles, ranked UT Southwestern amongst the prime 25 establishments in biomedical sciences in the world.

The argument for ARPA-H to come to Texas over different well-established research and biotech houses like Silicon Valley or North Carolina’s Research Triangle is additional bolstered by the state’s monetary dedication to high-risk research, the coalition stated.

Texans voted to create a bond fund dedicated to most cancers research, main to the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas in 2007. The institute makes use of its $6 billion in funding to award quarterly grants to Texas universities, scientists and firms in a number of classes. It represents the largest state most cancers research funding in U.S. historical past.

CPRIT’s CEO Wayne Roberts serves as certainly one of the leaders of the coalition to convey ARPA-H to Texas, as are executives from the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center and the University of Texas System.

The coalition’s fast and coordinated proposal is probably aided by its leaders’ expertise in efficiently pitching Texas as the web site for a special federal science mission a decade in the past. The same cohort of science advocates helped land a nationwide biosecurity middle at Texas A&M University for the growth of medication to battle bioterrorism threats and infectious illnesses.

“We organized a broad coalition of people around the state to communicate that we are ready, willing and able to work with this administration to meet the health needs of our nation. And that’s exactly what we’re saying here,” Graham stated. “We are ready, willing and able to work together to meet the science and bioscience needs of our nation and the world.”