FROM THE PRESIDENT
Before the Storm: a year of growth and preparation
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This culture of collaboration extended well beyond Texas Biomed’s walls in 2019, as we became part of an important collaborative with Southwest Research Institute, UT Health San Antonio and the University of Texas at San Antonio. The San Antonio Partnership for Precision Therapeutics (SAPPT) is a new and unique initiative aiming to capitalize on San Antonio’s bioscience strengths across the four institutions. SAPPT is bringing together earlystage researchers with translational researchers with clinicians and others to create a looped pipeline where information is fed across disciplines so that each stage informs the next and patient data improves and refines basic science and basic science drives better patient outcomes.
write this in the middle of 2020, when it is challenging to reflect back on 2019 — a time that seems so long ago after the events of this year. But, it is important to reflect back to a time when the Institute was sharpening its focus and began the long road toward achieving its 10-year vision of establishing the world’s leading infectious disease research institute. With the Institute’s 10-year strategic plan in its infancy, the team was, in fact, preparing for this very moment in history. The vision to be the go-to place for infectious disease research and development was aided by a concerted and strategic effort in 2019 to grow our people, programs and places, and grow we did. Since 2017, Texas Biomed has added 13 new faculty members. Our new faculty not only bring impressive grant portfolios and significant work on HIV, TB, flu, cancer and other related inflammatory diseases, along with veterinary medicine expertise, they bring with them a plethora of new ideas and a commitment to the Institute’s culture of collaboration, while further fostering our core values of Teamwork, Integrity, Diversity, Excellence and Safety.
The role of research is to inform — to produce data that will inform the development of new diagnostics, therapies and vaccines, which makes our scientists teachers by default. As 2019 was coming to a close, we began hearing about a new virus emerging, and our scientists were spending a great deal of time reading and learning so that we were prepared to be
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