After months of targeted campaigns by Texas cities, universities and science advocates, a $2.5 billion biotech research agency will call Dallas home, cementing North Texas’ place among the nation’s top life sciences hubs.
The Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, known as ARPA-H, announced Tuesday the decision to locate one of its three headquarters in the Lone Star State as part of the Biden administration’s effort to accelerate biomedical and health research. The hub’s focus is on customer experience, access and diversification of clinical trials for ARPA-H projects.
Pegasus Park in Dallas will serve as the physical headquarters location, but the Texas hub will extend far beyond the sprawling, 26-acre biotech campus. Austin, San Antonio and Houston make up the remainder of the consortium, which is managed by Advanced Technology International. Advocacy groups in El Paso and College Station have also supported the statewide team.
Pegasus Park sits across the Stemmons Freeway from Dallas’ sprawling Medical District. It is located approximately five miles from downtown and offers easy access to both major airports in North Texas.
The campus will house project managers responsible for leveraging the diversity that Texas has to offer, both in terms of demographics and type of research.
“One of the things that the Dallas group was really able to demonstrate was that they were able to bring together communities from across the state and across the country,” said Craig Gravitz, director of ARPA-H’s Project Accelerator Transition Innovation Office . “And we saw firsthand that it wasn’t just these big cities, but small communities as well, and that was such an important signal to us that the group that stood before us really had the unifying power that we were looking for. ”
Tuesday’s announcement also introduced ARPANET-H, the new name for the agency’s “hub-and-spoke” model, which will include spoke locations across the country in addition to specialized headquarters. The name is a nod to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s original ARPANET project, a public computer network that eventually became the Internet.
“When ARPA-H first began in 2022, one of the first goals was to catalyze the healthcare ecosystem,” said ARPA-H Director Renee Wegrzyn. “We cannot do this without people from all parts of the American healthcare ecosystem, and we cannot do this without people from all walks of life in America and people who are involved in transforming these healthcare solutions.”
The initial list of Spoke sites spans the country and includes locations in California, Alabama, Alaska and Wisconsin, among others. For these partners, which can be hospitals, health systems or universities, it costs nothing to become a Spoke. The closest location to Dallas is about four and a half hours north in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, at Cherokee Nation Health Service.
“A website will open tomorrow to accept applications for additional Spoke locations,” said Tom Luce, director of biotech initiatives at Lyda Hill Philanthropies. The Dallas organization, dedicated to funding discoveries in the life sciences, was the driving force behind Dallas’ bid to host ARPA-H.
Luce said he believes major health care players in Dallas will make good speeches, including UT Southwestern and Baylor Scott White Health. He specifically mentioned UT Southwestern Medical Center in RedBird, south of downtown Dallas, as a potential location.
North Texas has long struggled to stake its claim in the biotech world, competing against coastal research giants like Boston, Silicon Valley and North Carolina’s Research Triangle. The life sciences workforce pool, anchored by major medical institutions UT Southwestern in Dallas and the University of North Texas Health Science Center in Fort Worth, has grown 17%, or 26,000 workers, since 2019, according to a study by real estate firm CBRE.
“We wanted to make a statement that Lyda Hill has been working toward for at least 10 years, to really say that North Texas can and should be the life and life sciences center for the country,” Luce said. “And in our opinion, ARPA-H is evidence that Texas is now truly a third coast life sciences alternative.”
Winning ARPA-H’s new home is a big win for Dallas, which lost a bid for Amazon’s second headquarters about five years ago after being named a finalist. The tech giant’s headquarters eventually moved to Arlington, Virginia.
“North Texas is home to the best and brightest researchers and innovators, and choosing Dallas as the site of the ARPA-H Customer Experience Center shows that we can still achieve great things when we work together as Texans,” said U.S. Rep. Colin Allred, D-Dallas. “Today’s announcement further solidifies our region as a national leader in health research and groundbreaking new treatments. This hub will also create great jobs and spur economic development in an area where we are already growing.”
The architects of the ARPA-H proposal originally submitted an open-ended application detailing the unique advantages of each major city in Texas.
Wegrzyn announced in March that the agency would have three headquarters, one of which would be preemptively assigned to the Washington, D.C. area and would focus on partnerships. The exact location of the Capitol Area Hub has yet to be determined.
Another hub, located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, will serve as an “investor catalyst” and will be dedicated to bringing discoveries to market.
A Houston-based consortium led by the Texas Medical Center also applied for the Customer Experience Hub. Both the Dallas and Houston coalitions were selected to host site visits for the ARPA-H team, after which Houston’s application was eliminated, Luce said.
“It was disappointing. We wish they hadn’t decided to do that. “We wanted it to be a Texas application from the beginning, but Houston decided it would be better to go it alone,” Luce said. “But we definitely welcome them back. They have a lot to offer.”
Lyda Hill Philanthropies played an important role not only in developing the proposal for Dallas, Austin and San Antonio, but also in establishing North Texas as an incubator for biotech research.
The company’s namesake founded UT Southwestern’s Department of Bioinformatics in 2015 with a $25 million gift. Recently, her organization partnered with Research Bridge Partners to invest $4 million to help medical center researchers turn their findings into full-fledged companies.
North Texas politicians also participated in the application process, with several lawmakers from across the ideological spectrum penning a letter inviting Wegrzyn and Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra to visit Pegasus Park themselves.
The Texas bid that ultimately won the bid was a statewide effort that required coordination among university systems, cities and hospitals. Luce said he and his team had a list of more than 600 people involved in the application that they could call after the announcement.