With the opening of 5,000 square feet of new community lab space at its Eastside campus Thursday, VelocityTX will celebrate a major milestone: the complete build-out of the once crumbling Merchants Ice complex into a manicured, high-tech campus where more than 200 employees work each day.
The opening of VelocityTX Co-Labs will offer small and emerging bioscience companies affordable and flexible lab space to do research with pathogenic or infectious organisms that pose a moderate health hazard.
VelocityTX, formerly known as the Texas Research & Technology Foundation, was founded 40 years ago to promote economic development. Its mission has sharpened in recent years to focus on supporting the city’s biosciences sector and acting as a catalyst for growth on the East Side.
“This is a big moment for us,” VelocityTX CEO Rene Dominguez told the San Antonio Report Monday while preparing to host a ribbon cutting, tours of the new lab space and a happy hour reception Thursday afternoon. “The fact that we developed this entire city block in a little over four years is pretty amazing.”
Innovation district
After the celebration, the nonprofit’s long game continues. With the completion of the Merchants Ice complex property, VelocityTX can turn its full attention to the G.J. Sutton property just a block south, which it plans to develop over the next several years into a similar, albeit larger, innovation campus, ideally anchored by a military medical research tenant.
VelocityTX’s ultimate goal, or “North Star,” as Dominguez puts it, is to create an innovation district across roughly 70 acres of underdeveloped or industrial acreage on the East Side into mixed-use spaces centered around biosciences and military medical research, which is being consolidated under the Defense Health Agency.
Health care and biosciences already make up the largest single sector of San Antonio’s economy, estimated at $44 billion annually. Second only to that is the military’s economic impact here, which the Texas Comptroller’s office estimated was $39 billion in 2021.
Next month, VelocityTX hopes to further entwine and grow those economies by co-hosting the AIM Health R&D Summit, a mashup of two conferences that convene military, private industry and academia to expand research and commercialization opportunities around life-saving battlefield technologies.
Collaborative space
Among those attending Thursday’s event will be State Rep. Barbara Gervin-Hawkins, who has been a key supporter of VelocityTX’s vision for the East Side, and Robert Peche of the U.S. Economic Development Administration, which helped fund the new lab space with a $4 million federal grant.
Dominguez credited Peche with helping VelocityTX refine its proposal for the lab space.
The Co-Labs building offers four private lab spaces, one of which has already been leased, and shared lab space where startups can rent a single bench and vent hood, and take advantage of shared equipment.
Lessees will also have access to the adjacent VelocityTX Innovation Center, a 17,000-square-foot collaborative space with three AV-equipped conference rooms, an event center, media studio and co-working spaces.
Discounted admission to classes and events, community lunches and networking happy hours help fulfill VelocityTX’s mission as an incubator and support system for young bioscience companies.
‘Successful on all fronts’
Behind the new Co-Lab space is another newly completed building, which will allow one of the complex’s first tenants to expand.
GenCure, a subsidiary of San Antonio-based nonprofit BioBridge Global, is a full-service biomanufacturing organization that creates comprehensive cell and cell-based products used by other companies and researchers to develop new therapies for a range of conditions, including cancers, heart disease and wound care.
GenCure now has 35 employees, up from roughly 25 in 2020. The new building, which offers sweeping views of downtown from its second-floor western-facing windows, will house office, meeting and warehouse space for the company.
Martin Landon, CEO of BioBridge Global, said in a statement that the company’s 2019 decision to locate GenCure at the nascent innovation campus allowed it to “accelerate” construction of its biomanufacturing and process development facility while also helping to support Eastside investment.
“We think it’s been successful on all fronts,” he said.
Another tenant on the campus is Scorpius Biomanufacturing, a contract development and manufacturing organization that offers mammalian, microbial and cell therapies, and analytical and R&D services to pharmaceutical and biotech companies. It, too, has added employees since it was lured from North Carolina in 2022.
That’s also the year that the U.S. Army Institute of Surgical Research struck a deal with VelocityTX to move a handful of its researchers onto the innovation campus.
The four-story Merchants Ice building is now home to the headquarters of TransPecos Bank and its business affiliates, including Kennedy Sutherland LLP, a business law firm. Former TRTF CEO Randy Harig first approached the bank about locating its headquarters there, said Patrick J. Kennedy Jr., executive chairman and principal shareholder of the bank and founding partner of the law firm.
“We have a deep appreciation for historic buildings in San Antonio and also what the [former] Texas Research and Technology Foundation has done in purchasing the entire campus,” he said. “We needed to bring all our teams under one roof, so acquiring the building made sense to us.”
Today roughly 125 employees work out of the building, Kennedy said.
‘Our navigator’
In January, VelocityTX added a leader who is now playing a key role in its efforts to leverage the military’s expanding medical research in San Antonio for further collaboration and commercialization.
As director of innovation, Patricia Geppert will oversee military medical and startup support programming at the Eastside campus. She brings a wealth of experience and contacts to the role, having served as an associate director of research development at UTSA and in a faculty role at UT Health San Antonio. Geppert also worked as a bioinformatics and data analytics lead at Radiance Technologies, a Department of Defense contractor.
Geppert “serves as our military medical research liaison, connecting the private sector, key academic sectors and research entities,” Dominguez said. “It’s all about leveraging San Antonio’s strength in this industry. We’re lucky to have her as our navigator.”
VelocityTX recently took over the San Antonio Military Medical Innovation (SAMMI) initiative from the city, which aims to accelerate the commercialization of products and services required by the military medical community, boosting the region’s economic growth.
This June 24-25, VelocityTX will bring together two longstanding military medical research conferences as the AIM Health R&D Summit.
The AIM Summit will include Military Medical Industry Day and the San Antonio Military Health and Universities Research Forum. Both conferences facilitate collaboration and partnerships among the military medical research, academic research and the private sectors.
The goal is to grow the national profile of the conference. Attendees will learn how to work with the military on research and development, technology transfer, the military development cycle and funding opportunities.
“The military understands that the market for military medicine is not enough to sustain a private sector company,” Geppert said. “They need venture capital, too.”
The summit will also include Bexar County’s annual BexarBio pitch competition for biomedical startups, which this year will award $100,000 in cash prizes, $75,000 of that to the winner.
More than 50 startups applied for the pitch competition, a number that will eventually be winnowed by several panels of experts to the final four who will pitch live on June 24. The sheer number of applicants is a sign of the sector’s vitality, Geppert said.
“It’s an exciting event because it allows us to support and encourage the kinds of companies we hope to attract to the campus and the Co-Lab,” she said.
This article has been updated to correct the number of researchers from the U.S. Army Institute of Surgical Research and the number of employees at GenCure who work on the VelocityTX innovation campus.
