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Health Industry Tops Tourism As San Antonio's Lead Economic Engine

Posted on: Monday, 15 August 2005, 21:00 CDT

Aug. 14--SAN ANTONIO -- This used to be mainly a military town. Then it morphed into a fiesta-loving tourist destination.

Now the Alamo City is recasting itself as an up-and-coming medical treatment and research center that just happens to have a River Walk and Sea World.

With an impact of $13 billion a year, the city's health care and bioscience industries have surpassed tourism as the city's lead economic engine. And that estimate doesn't count the education dollars flowing through medical, dental, nursing and related schools.

Industry proponents say it took decades of planning and hard work, not just the travel downturn of 2001, to thrust the medical field to the forefront with 100,000 jobs and 14 percent of the local work force.

"The great thing is these are really good-paying jobs, with sustainability of employment for a long time," said Dr. Francisco Cigarroa, president of the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio.

"It's really helping not only the health care and bioscience industry, but it's having a huge ripple effect beyond that," he said.

Proponents hope to propel the city into the upper strata of medical communities, although admittedly it's not yet in the same league as some East and West Coast medical centers.

Renowned military careEven so, there's more than a century of history to build on here. The city has been the site of military medical training since 1870, and its two military hospitals, Brooke Army Medical Center and Wilford Hall Medical Center, are renowned for burn and trauma care. The Base Realignment and Closure Commission process could enhance the city's prestige by making Fort Sam Houston a main center for medic training.

Off post, a widening array of public and private facilities serves the nation's eighth-largest city, reducing but not eliminating the need for some area residents to seek specialized care elsewhere.

"Anyone who requires speciality care in San Antonio does not really have to leave," Cigarroa said. Patients can undergo complex procedures such as liver-kidney transplants and new noninvasive procedures here. Cutting-edge approaches to diabetes, aging and some cancers also are available.

"The spectrum, both in the academic and private setting, is spectacular," Cigarroa said.

Aggressive efforts are under way to enhance the city's medical portfolio with an eye toward reducing the city's reliance on tourism -- in the same way the city emerged from post-World War II dependence on military and civil service payrolls 20 years ago.

Cisneros' initiativeWhen Henry Cisneros became mayor in 1981, with military spending waning, he and other leaders began the first initiative to promote the biomedical industry. Two decades later, the former Clinton administration housing secretary has reignited that campaign.

As chairman of the economic development council of the Greater San Antonio Chamber of Commerce, Cisneros helped launch the Healthcare and Bioscience Development Corp. to lure medical enterprises and strengthen the local industry's four "pillars" -- medical services, biomedical research, medical education and biosciences.

In 1992, health care and bioscience had an estimated annual impact of $6.4 billion, half the current level. By the end of the '90s, experts began noting a sea change.

A 2003 chamber study verified that medicine had supplanted tourism, which brings in about $7 billion a year, as the city's strongest industry.

"We're proud of our tourism base, and we've always relied on the military. Toyota represents a new manufacturing opportunity for us. But we think the long-term, lead engine for San Antonio's future are these four pillars," Cisneros said.

"When the BRAC process is finished, this will be -- after the Walter Reed and Bethesda complex in the Washington, D.C., area -- the lead complex for military medical education in the country," Cisneros said.

Vital industryBiotech companies including Genzyme Oncology, DPT Laboratories and Kenetic Concepts Inc., have garnered attention. Smaller innovators are proliferating along with other medical enterprises while insurance giant USAA adds to the sector's vigor, Cisneros said. Phoenix Biotechnology Inc., for example, is collaborating with M.D. Anderson Cancer Center to develop an anti-cancer drug derived from South Texas oleander.

Other signs of industry vitality were abundant this month. Hundreds of job openings were posted. The South Texas Blood and Tissue Center opened the state's first repository for umbilical cord blood. CEDRA Clinical Research opened a 200-bed facility for pharmaceutical testing.

"Yet, all the major studies show that for all of our strengths, we're not ranked among the largest biomedical or health care centers in the country," Cisneros said, citing 2003 studies conducted by the Milken Institute and the Brookings Institution.

"We have to get more outsiders to recognize the strength of our clinical capabilities so they think of us in the same breath as they think of Houston and Dallas," he said.

Houston, with the nation's largest medical complex, was the only Texas city in the Milken Institute's top-20 list of major metropolitan health-industry concentrations. The home of the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center and the Baylor College of Medicine ranked 15th in the 2003 analysis.

More is requiredBut much more is required to take San Antonio to the upper echelons of medical communities, Cisneros said.

"We have to generate more research dollars. Whereas research in the great centers up north -- like Boston and New York -- are in the $1-billion-a-year range, ours is in the $100-million-a-year range, so we have a long way to go," Cisneros said.

Still, the strong base of medical training schools is a long-term plus, he added.

As an original member of Cisneros' science and technology task force in the 1980s, Mary Pat Moyer takes pride in reviewing the local medical industry's maturation, which parallels her own success. In 1993, the former microbiology professor founded INCELL Corp. LLC, and developed it into a globally recognized researcher.

"We have one product in clinical trials at Johns Hopkins, which is a cancer therapy. Our other project is a smallpox vaccine," she said.

"Our vision for our company is to revolutionize vaccine delivery worldwide. That's a big, hairy, audacious goal, but that's what we intend to do."

It takes visionGetting the city to this point wasn't a matter of overnight success but the result of "visionary leadership" over many years, she said.

"It's been over 20 years now that I've been carrying a flag for our business sector. Now, to see that it's really, really, really happening is very exciting to me," Moyer said.

Her enthusiasm is contagious. Now Natalie Del Toro, 19, has the bug. After serving as an INCELL intern this summer, Del Toro has decided on a new career plan -- biomedical research. For years she considered nursing, but her work growing cells in a high-tech lab changed her course.

"Ever since I was a little girl, I've wanted to work in the medical field," the UTSA junior biology major said.

Keeping talent at homeHer paid internship was made possible by a new city initiative called the "Ambassador Program," which finds summer jobs in San Antonio for high-performing college students -- both local and from out-of-town -- who might otherwise seek employment in other cities. The program addresses a nagging problem for San Antonio -- the large number of talented students who go study elsewhere and don't return.

"They've been educated elsewhere. They live in New Jersey, New York, Michigan and California, and they want to come home. They'll bring those skill sets with them, but there need to be more jobs available," Moyer said.

Medical manufacturing is one potential growth area, but San Antonio faces tough competition for those projects, she added. Still, San Antonio and other Texas cities would be best-served by collaborating rather than competing, she suggested. "In Texas, we tend to build barbed wire fences around our regions," she said. "There are so many opportunities if Texans work together and leverage our resources collectively."

RESOURCES PILLARS: Four main "pillars" of San Antonio's health care and bioscience industry:

Medical services:

--Four hospital systems

--Two military hospitals

--Veterans Administration hospital

--Cancer Therapy and Research Center

--Children's Cancer Institute

--Two organ transplant centers

--South Texas Blood and Tissue Center

Research:

--University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio

--Southwest Research Institute

--Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research

--Military and private labs

Education:

--UTHSCSA medical, dental, nursing and allied health schools

--University of the Incarnate Word School of Nursing and Health Professions

--University of Texas at San Antonio

--Alamo Community College District

--Military medical training

Biosciences:

--Pharmaceuticals

--Biotechnology companies

--Medical device manufacturers

--Business incubator

Source: Greater San Antonio Chamber of Commerce

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Source: Houston Chronicle

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