Dallas acquires coveted federal biotechnology research center after months of campaigning

A $2.5 billion federal biotechnology research agency will make Dallas its home after months of targeted campaigns by Texas cities, universities and science advocates, cementing North Texas’ place among the nation’s major life science centers.

The Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, known as ARPA-H, announced the decision Tuesday to establish one of its three headquarters in the Lone Star State as part of the Biden administration’s push to accelerate biomedical and health research. The center will focus on customer experience and access to and diversification of clinical trials for ARPA-H projects.

Pegasus Park in Dallas will serve as the physical location of the headquarters, but the Texas hub will reach far beyond the biotech’s sprawling 26-acre campus. Austin, San Antonio and Houston make up the rest of the consortium, which is managed by Advanced Technology International. Stakeholders in El Paso and College Station also threw their support behind the statewide team.

Pegasus Park is located across Stemmons Highway from Dallas’ expansive medical district. It is about five miles from downtown and provides easy access to both major North Texas airports.

The campus will have project managers responsible for taking advantage of the diversity Texas has to offer, both in demographics and types of research.

“One of the things that the Dallas group was really able to show is that they were able to bring communities from across the state and country together,” said Craig Gravitz, director of ARPA-H’s Transition Innovation Office for the Accelerator Project. “And we saw firsthand that it wasn’t just these big cities, but smaller communities as well, and that was an important signal to us that the group in front of us really had that collective power that we were looking for.”

Tuesday’s announcement also launched ARPANET-H, the new name for the agency’s “hub and spoke” model that will include spoke locations across the country as well as a dedicated headquarters. The name is a reference to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s original ARPANET project, a public computer network that eventually became the Internet.

“When ARPA-H first started in 2022, one of the first goals was to stimulate a healthy ecosystem,” said ARPA-H Director Rene Wijrzyn. “We can’t do it without people from every segment of the American health ecosystem, and we can’t do it without people from every walk of life in America and the people involved in moving those health solutions.”

The initial list of targeted locations includes all parts of the country, with locations in California, Alabama, Alaska, Wisconsin and more. Becoming a speaker costs nothing for these partners, which can be hospitals, health systems or universities. The closest designated site to Dallas is about four and a half hours north in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, at NHS Cherokee.

A website will open tomorrow to take applications for additional sites, said Tom Luce, director of biotechnology initiatives at Lyda Hill Philanthropies. The Dallas organization, dedicated to funding life science discoveries, led Dallas’ application to host ARPA-H.

Luce said he believes major players in the health care world in Dallas would be good speakers, including UT Southwestern and Baylor Scott White Health. RedBird specifically listed UT Southwestern Medical Center, located south of downtown Dallas, as a possible potential location.

North Texas has long struggled to stake its claim in the biotech world, pitted against coastal research giants like Boston, Silicon Valley and North Carolina’s Research Triangle. Thanks to major medical institutions at the University of Texas Southwestern in Dallas and the University of North Texas Health Science Center in Fort Worth, DFW’s life sciences employment pool has increased 17%, or 26,000 workers, since 2019, according to Research conducted by real estate company CBRE.

Landing the new ARPA-H home is a big win for Dallas, which lost out on a bid for Amazon’s second headquarters about five years ago after being named a finalist. Eventually, the tech giant moved its headquarters to Arlington, Virginia.

“North Texas is home to the best and brightest researchers and innovators, and choosing Dallas as the location for the ARPA-H Customer Experience Center shows that we can still do big things when we work together as Texans,” said the U.S. Rep. Colin Allred, Democrat from Dallas. Today’s announcement strengthens our region as a national leader in healthcare research and groundbreaking new treatments. “This center will also provide great job opportunities and promote economic development in an area where we are already seeing growth.”

ARPA-H’s demonstration engineers originally submitted an open application detailing the unique features of each major Texas city.

Wegrzyn announced in March that the agency would have three headquarters, with one proactively designated for the Washington, D.C., region, which would focus on partnerships. The exact location of the Capitol District center has not yet been determined.

The other center, which will be based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, will serve as an “investor catalyst” dedicated to bringing discoveries to market.

A Houston consortium led by the Texas Medical Center also led the Customer Experience Center. The Dallas and Houston consortiums were chosen to host site visits for the ARPA-H team, after which the Houston bid was canceled, Luce said.

“It was disappointing. We wish they hadn’t decided to do so. From the beginning we wanted it to be a Texas show, but Houston decided it was better for them to go it alone,” Luce said. “But we would certainly welcome them back. They have a lot to offer.”

The Lyda Hill Charitable Foundation played an important role not only in shaping the Dallas, Austin and San Antonio bid, but also in establishing North Texas as an incubator for biotechnology research.

The namesake company established the Department of Bioinformatics at the University of Texas Southwestern with a $25 million grant in 2015, and more recently, its organization partnered with Research Bridge Partners to invest $4 million in helping researchers at the medical center turn their findings into full-fledged companies.

North Texas politicians also participated in the application process, with several lawmakers from across the ideological spectrum writing a letter inviting Wegrzyn and Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra to visit Pegasus Park themselves.

The Texas bid that ultimately won was a statewide effort that required coordination among university, city and hospital systems. Luce said he and his team have a list of more than 600 people involved in the application to contact after the announcement.