Texas Medical Center (TMC) will soon build a single, centralized medical ecosystem, starting with the TMC BioPort, a biomanufacturing center that will span hundreds of acres in Southwest Houston.
The announcement was made during a State of TMC event on September 20, Community Impact reported.
Houston Public Media reported that the BioPort would manufacture and distribute medical supplies, pharmaceuticals, and therapies.
“TMC BioPort is the manufacturing engine of TMC,” the Texas Medical Center website shared about the new addition. “Cutting-edge discoveries” will lead to “life-changing solutions” that “can be distributed on-demand.”
Expecting America’s supply chain to grow stronger, TMC said, “BioPort will further impact societal change by providing on-site upskill training and education at an early age.”
The “world’s largest medical complex” will add to its campus and feature new educational and training facilities, according to the website. It will bring around 147,000 new jobs to Houston and will have an estimated economic impact of $63 billion.
The TMC CEO and President, Bill McKeon, shared during the September 20 event that the recent Covid-19 pandemic revealed supply chain weaknesses.
“During the COVID-19 pandemic, we saw the weakness of our supply chain, which is largely outside the United States,” McKeon said. “From vaccines, from major drugs, there’s a huge move underway in Washington, [D.C.], to move a lot of that technology back to the United States.”
The BioPort will also help the TMC campus double in size to over 70 million square feet “in five to 10 years,” according to McKeon.
There is no definite timeline for construction of the TMC BioPort yet, but McKeon shared that construction could start as soon as 2025.
Helix Park will also be added to Texas Medical Center; the hub will be a space for academia, medicine, and science and will open in 2023, TMC shared in a Facebook post.
With 6 million square feet of research labs, retail, hotel, and large-scale commercialization, Helix Park will have an estimated economic impact of $5.4 billion. More than 18 acres of public green space will accompany the park, allowing people to enjoy music, art, and food.
“Just as DNA contains all the instructions for an organism to grow and reproduce, TMC Helix Park is the stimulative core of TMC,” the Facebook post stated. It is where “the best minds in medicine, science, and academia” will converge to “rapidly advance new breakthroughs and scale their enterprise,” the social media post explained.
In 2015, the Texas Medical Center established the TMC Innovation Factory for entrepreneurs and innovators in a space previously used as a Nabisco cookie factory.
