LOCAL Houston | The City Guide January 2018 | Page 35

FOOD | ARTS | COMMUNITY | STYLE+LEISURE
INNOVATION THROUGH COLLABORATION
BILL MCKEON LEADS THE TEXAS MEDICAL CENTER INTO THE FUTURE
“FOR 70 YEARS, THE TEXAS MEDICAL CENTER HAS BEEN LARGELY FOCUSED ON INFRASTRUCTURE – BUILDING THE BEST CANCER HOSPITAL, THE LARGEST
CHILDREN’S HOSPITAL IN THE WORLD, ETC. – BUT THE NEXT 100 YEARS WILL BE ABOUT LEVERAGING SYNERGIES AMONG OUR 60 MEMBER INSTITUTIONS IN A
COLLECTIVE WAY. THE FUTURE IS COLLABORATION,” SAYS WILLIAM “BILL” MCKEON, PRESIDENT AND CEO OF THE TEXAS MEDICAL CENTER SINCE APRIL 2017.
Responsible for driving strategic, operational and programmatic initiatives across the
Texas Medical Center’s member institutions to enhance its leadership position in the
life sciences, he epitomizes the word trailblazer in every sense of the word.
McKeon joined the Texas Medical Center in 2013 as executive vice president, chief
operating and strategy officer, coming from Stanford University Medical Center. “What
an opportunity…to come to the largest medical city on earth and be able to work on
its transformation. Something has changed in the world – large institutions are coming
together; the Broad Institute in Boston is probably the best example, bringing together
MIT, Harvard and Harvard-affiliated hospitals to advance biomedicine research,” he
explains. “Overnight, it became the leading place in the world to do genomics through
collaboration. Boston is the center of biomedicine now.”
McKeon fully believes similar opportunities abound at the Texas Medical Center.
From the day he started at TMC, he has been instrumental in the strategic planning
process that established the future of the sprawling complex. Through that process,
TMC executives brought together leaders from all the member institutions (hospitals,
medical schools, academic institutions) and laid plans to establish five institutes
focused on collaboration: innovation, health policy, clinical research, genomics and
regenerative medicine.
Contained in the Innovation Institute are several unique programs, like TMCx, a startup
accelerator, and TMCx+, a 24,000sf co-working space that provides both private
and open working space for more developed healthcare companies. In March 2016,
McKeon and the TMC team recruited Fortune 100 global company Johnson & Johnson
to plant a flag for the first time in the state of Texas. Johnson & Johnson opened
JLABS @ TMC, a 36,000sf co-working and incubator space for health care and biotech
companies. In November of this year, J&J doubled down on their investment in the
TMC and opened the Center for Device Innovation (CDI @ TMC). A first of its kind
for J&J, the 26,000sf facility brings together expertise and resources for taking new
medical technologies from concept to commercialization while providing J&J’s medical
devices research and development teams a state-of-the-art “maker space” to rapidly
prototype and access preclinical facilities across the Texas Medical Center.
WHAT’S NEXT ON THE HORIZON? The $1.5 billion 30-acre “TMC3 Innovation
Campus,” complete with retail, a hotel, shared research space for its four major (and
fiercely competitive) research institutions (University of Texas, Texas A & M University,
M.D. And erson Cancer Center and Baylor College of Medicine). “Traditionally, institu-
tions would come to the CEO of the Texas Medical Center and ask for three acres for
themselves,” says McKeon, “but now we’re getting major institutions coming to the
table together to share a common space. They’ll save money and achieve economies
of scale, but they’ll also unlock collaborative potential, and that’s priceless.”
The TMC Innovation Institute has been McKeon’s “baby” from the beginning. Using his
vision, TMC renovated 100,000sf of an old Nabisco cookie factory at 2450 Holcombe
Blvd. into a modern space that is now home to much of Houston’s rapidly growing
innovation ecosystem. The Innovation Institute, opened in October 2014, was devel-
oped as a way to attract startups and health care technology companies to Houston.
12.14.2017
6:12pm
By Tim Moloney
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| Photography by Kennon Evett
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