Chancellor
McTeer (right) and Arthur Sands, president and chief
executive officer of Lexicon Genetics, sign an agreement to establish
TIGM
As Dallas Fed president I became known, perhaps pejoratively, as a cheerleader for the New Economy. To that charge, I plead guilty. Information and communication technology, harnessed by the Internet, had changed everything. A doubling of productivity growth in the late 1990s had made higher output and employment growth possible with lower inflation. It enabled the Fed to give growth a chance.
Even then, I said that high biotech would be even more important than high electronic tech. The mapping of the human genome would also change everything, but I never dreamed I would have a ringside seat at the biotech revolution.
It happened that one of my first meetings as chancellor of the Texas A&M University System last November was in Governor Rick Perry’s office on a bovine genome project, in which we are a partner. The first order of business was for me to do some scientific research and determine whether “bovine” referred to pigs or cows. Armed with that knowledge, I went to the meeting feeling confident.
At the meeting, a leader in genetic research, who by chance is a friend of mine, told me, in effect, that in the world of genetics, mice are bigger than cows since mice and humans have 99 percent of their genes in common. (I later learned that the 99 percent probably applies to other species as well. What makes mice genes the preferred research subject is their modeling capability.) Anyway, my friend alerted me to an opportunity to partner with Houston-based Lexicon Genetics in a public-private partnership that would extend genetic research into new frontiers. Preliminary discussions were already under way to team up with the company.
Lexicon had developed the largest gene knockout capability in the world—the technology to block, or “knock out,” single genes from mice so their clones can be studied to determine the function of the missing gene. Once isolated and analyzed, the gene’s human counterpart can be found. The potential for breakthroughs in curing and preventing disease would be great. The chief biology editor of Nature foresaw the importance of the mouse genome in 2002, saying it holds the “experimental key to the human genome.” Of course, scientists seem to have known that intuitively for a long time.
Last month, I was honored to sign a three-way agreement—between Lexicon Genetics, the state of Texas and The Texas A&M University System—to form the Texas Institute for Genomic Medicine, or TIGM. The honor was especially great for me since all I knew about mice coming into the job was what I’d learned emptying my mother’s mouse traps as a boy; that it’s usually the second mouse that gets the cheese.
TIGM will receive $50 million from the Texas Enterprise Fund to purchase from Lexicon and house two copies of a library of 350,000 embryonic mouse stem cell lines. One library will be located at the A&M System Health Science Center’s Institute of Biosciences and Technology in Houston and the other at Texas A&M in College Station.
Once up and running, TIGM will be home to the world’s largest library of knockout mouse cell lines. Through partnerships and other arrangements, TIGM will make this resource available to researchers worldwide, which should greatly accelerate the progress of genomic research and the development of drugs to treat and prevent a broad range of diseases.
This investment equals the largest ever made by the Texas Enterprise Fund, which was established to promote economic development and jobs. As part of the agreement, the A&M System and Lexicon have committed to the creation of at least 5,000 new jobs over a 10-year period.
The success of the Texas Enterprise Fund has led the state Legislature to authorize the new companion Emerging Technology Fund, a name that speaks for itself. We hope to be a leader in that arena, too, as we spin out new businesses from TIGM discoveries.
I’m proud that the A&M System is part of an exciting new enterprise that will create new businesses, new jobs and, most of all, new hope for major progress against disease. Maybe—just maybe—the Texas Gulf Coast will become the third coast of biotechnology in America.
Jazz musician Euby Blake is reputed to have commented in his 90s that had he known he would live so long, he would have taken better care of himself. I think that’s becoming good advice for all of us.
