TMC Innovation Institute Puts Houston at Forefront of Entrepreneurship By Michael Hardy
H
ouston is well known for its oil and gas companies, its cutting-edge space science research, and its world-class hospitals. Until recently, though, the Bayou City hasn’t had a reputation as a hotbed of entrepreneurship. But that’s starting to change, thanks largely to the Texas Medical Center, the world’s largest medical complex. In 2015, the medical center launched the TMC Innovation Institute. Based in a 100,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art facility (formerly a Nabisco factory) near Hermann Park, the institute has captured nationwide attention, attracting blue chip partners like AT&T and Johnson
& Johnson to set up research labs, and helping launch over 150 new companies through its start-up accelerator, TMCx. Erik Halvorsen, the director of the Innovation Institute, was recruited to Houston from Boston, where he held leadership roles at Tufts, Harvard, and the Boston Children’s Hospital. “When they called me up, I had never heard of the Texas Medical Center,” Halvorson admitted. “But then they were like, it’s M.D. Anderson, it’s the Baylor College of Medicine, it’s Texas Children’s Hospital…. And of course I knew all about those institutions.” Halvorsen took the job with the goal of
harnessing the TMC’s vast resources—61 member institutions, over 180,000 annual surgeries, 9,200 patient beds—to make Houston the leader in digital health and medical device start-ups. “Size matters,” he said. “We offer access to doctors, access to data, access to patients. Silicon Valley doesn’t have that. Boston doesn’t have that. If you put all the hospitals in Boston together it would still be half the size of the Texas Medical Center.” Perhaps the Innovation Institute’s most ambitious initiative is TMCx, a fullyfunded start-up accelerator that attracts hundreds of applications every year from bio-medical companies around the world. TMCx offers two four-and-
a-half-month programs a year, one for digital health and one for medical device development. Each company receives intensive mentoring and full access to the resources of the Texas Medical Center. One of the start-ups currently in residence at TMCx is Revealix, an Austin-based company that’s developing mobile technology to detect wounds in patients with diabetes. Such wounds, which often go unnoticed by the patient, can require the amputation of a foot or leg; in fact, every 20 seconds someone loses a limb to diabetes. Hospitals have sophisticated imaging machines that can detect such wounds,
but by the time a diabetic patient gets to the hospital it’s often too late. What if there were a simple way for primary care nurses and doctors to check a patient for wounds? That’s just what Revealix is working on, said co-founder and CEO Adrianna Cantu. Catching wounds before they reach critical stage would save diabetic patients their limbs and greatly reduce the $40 billion the U.S. spends on preventable diabetic skin and foot complications. “The most expensive part of diabetes is when there’s a complication in a diabetic’s limb,” Cantu explained. “When someone has a wound, that’s when 85 percent of amputations start. It’s one of those things
“There’s no way you can do this unless you’re sitting in the middle of the largest medical center in the world... it has to be here.”
where if we can get ahead of that, you can intervene. It’s actually one of the most preventable complications if we pick up on it early enough.” Cantu showed me an iPhone with a special attachment that turns the phone’s camera into a thermal image scanner. After scanning a patient’s legs or arms with the camera, the data can be uploaded to the cloud, where Revealix’s specialized software algorithm will determine whether the patient may have a wound. If so, they can confirm that result at a hospital and proceed with treatment from there.
Participating in the TMCx accelerator has been a game-changer for the company, Cantu said. She showed me a notebook filled with the names of the doctors, researchers, and venture capitalists she’s already met with. “One of the hardest things for anyone doing digital health is to have access to as many stakeholders as possible to validate or invalidate all aspects of the business. You have to solve the clinical, you have to solve the deployment, you have to solve the business, you have to solve your messaging.” Among the Innovation Institute’s other initiatives are TMCx+, which leases
office space at below-market rates to health start-ups, giving them access to the institute’s full range of services and resources; a fully-funded biodesign fellowship that gives eight entrepreneurs each year one-on-one mentoring; and TMCi—the i stands for ‘industry’— which will host large companies like Accenture and Deloitte that want to have a presence at the institute. “It’s about finding the right mix of startup companies, big companies, and investors,” Halvorsen said. Perhaps the biggest votes of confidence in the institute have come from AT&T and Johnson & Johnson, both of
which have built high-tech research centers there. The AT&T Foundry for Connected Health @ TMC is dedicated to researching home technology to improve the quality of out-patient care. Johnson & Johnson built JLabs to develop and test its own medical devices, as well as hosting its own crop of start-up companies. For Halvorsen, fostering a healthy entrepreneurial environment is all about matching the right investors with the right start-up companies. “There’s no lack of money in Houston,” he observed. “There’s wealthy individuals who aren’t afraid to put money at risk—they just
do it by digging a hole in the ground or buying real estate. Part of our mission is to show them that there’s other investments they can make in these start-up companies. And the mantra is, you can do well by doing good. You can make a bunch of money investing in a company that’s going to be successful, and you can do good because they’re going to develop a product that’s going to help sick people.”
got 140 companies here, so I guarantee I have something you care about. You care about diabetes? I have five diabetes companies here.”
And healthcare, after all, is something that touches all of us. “Maybe you have a daughter with autism, or a dad with diabetes, or a mother with breast cancer,” he said. “The cool thing is, I’ve
“There’s no way you can do this unless you’re sitting in the middle of the largest medical center in the world,” she said. “It has to be here.”
One of those diabetes companies, of course, is Revealix, developer of the mobile wound detection technology. Cantu said her company would never have come this far without participating in the TMCx accelerator program.