Life sciences talk brings major development news at Urban Land Institute panel

The life sciences industry in Austin is so active and bustling with deals and investments that, over the course of an hour’s discussion last week, leaders in the field dropped a pair of hints about forthcoming significant developments for the local economy.

At Urban Land Institute Austin’s monthly panel discussion on the area’s future as a life sciences hub, Charisse Bodisch, senior vice president of economic development for Opportunity Austin, said a major life sciences company will soon be building or taking over 250,000 square feet of space in the Austin region. And later in the talk, Harold Strong, executive director of Texas State University’s STAR Park incubator, said the outfit is preparing to announce the creation of a 64-megawatt solar farm on one of its campuses to meet some of the high-capacity energy needs of life sciences companies.

Broadly speaking, life sciences covers an array of fields including pharmaceuticals, medical devices, biotechnology, health diagnostics, contract research organizations and medical and health technology. While those fields have historically been focused in California’s Bay Area, greater Boston and the Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill triangle in North Carolina, more than a decade ago Austin leaders saw the creation of the Dell Medical School as the starting point for becoming a player as well.

Bodisch said the life sciences footprint in the area has grown from about 25 companies in 2006 to nearly 300 as of the last hard count, with the added heft of 54 hospitals in the region and 108,000 people employed in health care overall.

Opportunity Austin has identified life sciences as one of the pillars of local job growth for its next five-year employment plan. That means the area’s real estate developers and planners will either need to build or renovate available commercial space that can accommodate wet labs – that is, experimental labs where drugs, chemicals and other types of biological matter are tested using various liquids – needed for research and the increased power, water, ventilation and other unique infrastructure needs.

“It is so crazy what is happening with health care today and how it’s tied into technology. And a lot of those, they may not need that wet lab space,” Bodisch said.

“The (medical school) innovation district, you’ve got a tower over there that was not equipped with a wet lab … so targets for that are health tech and medtech. We’ve got an advantage over some of these other more mature markets because we have so much depth with software engineering and with those technologies.”

One area targeted for substantial investment in life sciences is the 3M campus on RM 2222 near FM 620, which has 1.3 million square feet of space and features the science-focused infrastructure needed for major pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies.

Bart Olds, a managing director for Karlin Real Estate, said the company sees major potential in the 3M property, with its preparation for new tenants representing a large portion of the $250 million Karlin has invested in the Austin area in recent years.

“I would be hard pressed to find another example of something similar if I tried in the whole world than the 3M campus,” he said. “We truly believe that that has the potential to change the world. The $1 billion of infrastructure that is there has really given us a backbone to build on and really be kind of an anchor of one of the hubs of innovation and life science in Austin.”

In an attempt to meet the needs for life sciences companies seeking to grow or relocate to Austin, City Council recently adopted a resolution that amended the North Burnet/Gateway Regulating Plan to make the University of Texas’ J.J. Pickle Research Campus in North Austin more adaptable to biotech and laboratory use.

National players also see Austin as the center of a statewide play in the life sciences industry, with Emerald Cloud Lab, an automated laboratory that provides experiment and research services for the pharmaceutical, biotech and life science industries, relocating to Austin from San Francisco. The move into a 105,000-square-foot lab – seven times its previous space – was made possible because Austin’s going rate of $30-40 per square foot for lab space is less than half of other life sciences hubs.

More positive indicators for the local life sciences economy come from a recent study from Austin Medtech Connect and Austin Next, which found that venture capital investment in the sector grew by 1,000 percent from 2017 to 2023, enough to rank 10th nationally. The report also found the life sciences workforce has grown by 74 percent over the past three years – to 18,000 workers total.

Growing that workforce to meet the industry’s demands is one of the priorities for Strong, who said Texas State and Austin Community College will be among the main suppliers of lab techs and other workers needed to keep up with expected growth.

“The Texas State component is workforce development, hosting, de-risking and commercializing, assisting commercialization of technologies and partnering with ACC in terms of providing workforce to help grow the area, as well as working with the community around just to kind of make certain that ecosystem continues to grow,” he said.

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