SAN ANTONIO – The area just east of downtown San Antonio, where items ranging from produce to mink stoles were kept in cold storage, is now in the heart of what’s being called the Life Science Innovation District.
The old Merchants Ice Storage Building is now the home of the Texas Research and Technology Foundation (TRTF) and its bioscience innovation hub, Co-Labs.
Randy Harig, the foundation’s CEO, said its billion-dollar investment in San Antonio’s East Side would have been unthinkable at one time.
“I think even now it’s a challenge,” Harig said. “I was challenged by a couple of my directors when we first picked this area of ‘Why here?'”
Harig said he told them, “If we don’t, nobody will.”
After years of being on the far West Side, where its Texas Research Park was first developed, Harig said TRTF wanted to be downtown.
Just beyond the railroad tracks was San Antonio’s East Side, which Harig said he saw as an underdeveloped area.
“Everything else in town was booming,” Harig said.
Co-Labs has 10 tenants. Several of them are involved in stem cell manufacturing, such as GenCure, a subsidiary of BioBridge Global, which also operates the San Antonio Blood Bank.
Becky Cap, a founding director of GenCure, said stem cells and immune cells undergo genetic reprogramming to deliver specialized therapies.
Cap said it’s known as precision medicine, “specifically targeting diseases.”
“It’s using the body’s own defenses against disease to treat the diseases that we have today,” Cap said.
Harig said he wants to assure the East Side community none of what Co-Labs develops is hazardous to them or the environment.
“Not at all,” Harig said. “Everything is very benign that we’re working on.”
Harig said he is well aware Co-Labs is new to the neighborhood, which is why it’s been reaching out to political and religious leaders, neighborhood groups, and schools. He said it also has STEM programs in many of those schools, educating its employees of the future.
In hopes of filling specific jobs in the future, Harig said, “We will have a training component for all age people.”
Just up the street from their new neighbor, Myrtle Stout said her mother has lived in the same house for more than 40 years.
Along with new people moving into recently renovated homes and the new condominiums being built, Stout said she would never have dreamed a company would invest a billion dollars in the East Side.
She said, “It was about time.”
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