Texas Medical Center's new 500-acre biomanufacturing center to bring 100,000 jobs to Houston

The Texas Medical Center plans to build a 500-acre biomanufacturing and medical supplies distribution center in Houston, a project that represents the latest push to establish the city as a premier hub for life sciences. The new campus, called TMC BioPort, is still in the early stages of development. But once it's completed, it’s expected to double the overall size of the medical center and create 100,000 jobs for Greater Houston residents, TMC President and CEO Bill McKeon said. The medical center has been focused on expanding its presence in the life sciences ecosystem in recent years through projects such as TMC Innovation and TMC Helix Park. McKeon sees TMC BioPort as a natural evolution of that strategy; the campus could be home to manufacturing and distribution for cell and gene therapies, pharmaceuticals and medical supplies.

“We really think that this is the last missing piece to this largest life science ecosystem in the country,” McKeon said in an interview Wednesday. The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the risk of depending on manufacturing from overseas, as many hospitals struggled to secure personal protective equipment and other critical supplies. Having manufacturing and distribution in Houston would help the region, as well as other areas of the country, avoid similar problems in the future, McKeon said. “We need to have these things in the U.S., and being the largest medical city in the world, we are the largest utilizer of supplies,” McKeon said. “It becomes even more of a critical thing for us to solve.” Having an easily obtainable stock of medical supplies nearby would be a significant benefit to hospitals that struggled to source them during the pandemic, said Dr. Paul Klotman, the president and CEO of Baylor College of Medicine.