Since then, Prockop, director of the Institute for Regenerative Medicine at Scott & White Memorial Hospital, has moved his research lab to Temple and he anticipates beginning clinic trials here sometime next year.
An open house was held Thursday at the Institute for Regenerative Medicine, located at Scott & White’s West Campus.
When it became known Prockop was willing to move his research lab, a group made up of representatives from A&M College of Medicine, Scott & White, Temple Health and Bioscience District and others began looking at ways to bring the lab to Central Texas, said Dr. Christopher Colenda, dean of medicine, Texas A&M Health Science Center College of Medicine.
More than $40 million was pledged to establish the Institute of Regenerative Medicine, which is made up of 40,000 square feet of research space, with 20,000 square feet devoted to laboratories and 6,000 square feet to clinical manufacturing laboratories.
This is a big investment and it comes with obligations, Prockop said.
A few years ago, Prockop said he was pessimistic about delivering on the promise of breakthrough therapies, but through the work of hundreds of scientists, researchers have learned how the body repairs itself naturally.
With a small amount of bone marrow, millions of adult stem cells can be manufactured and returned back to the patient, making it possible to speed up the natural process of repair, he said.
Prockop, the inaugural holder of the Stearman Chair of Genomic Medicine and professor of molecular and cellular medicine at Texas A&M Health Science Center College of Medicine, said when the manufacturing lab is operating, it will be able to produce 500 million to a billion adult stem cells from one sample of bone marrow.
“We’ve been working with these cells for over a decade and they still amaze us,” Prockop said.
The number of diseases that can be treated using adult stem cells are many, but Prockop’s group will target diabetes initially.
“We’re going to proceed as slowly as we can and as carefully as we can,” Prockop said. “We don’t want to be the first, we want to be the best.”
Several years ago a group from A&M and Scott & White toured the former Texas Instruments plant and talked about what might happen if the partnership between A&M College of Medicine and Scott & White continued to grow, said Dr. Nancy Dickey, Texas A&M Health Science Center president and vice chancellor for health affairs Texas A&M System.
And grow it did.
The old TI building is now home to the Institute of Regenerative Medicine, The Institute for Cancer Research and the Bioscience Institute.
“If you plot out what’s happening in the state of Texas in the way of bioscience, it just walks right up I-35 from San Antonio to Dallas and that puts Temple, Texas, right in the heart of it,” Dr. Dickey said.
Having the Institute of Regenerative Medicine as part of its system has many implications for the A&M college of medicine, she said.
“It helps us attract the very brightest students,” Dr. Dickey said.
Medical students who have spent time in Prockop’s lab, she said, are excited by the opportunities they see for themselves as they move forward in the careers.
Also, Prockop, a member of the Institute of Medicine and the National Academy of Sciences, knows how to collaborate, to reach out to other departments - engineering, chemistry and public health - and develop ways to use his research, Dr. Dickey said.
“Every health science center would like to be the source of solutions to advance patient care . . . Dr. Prockop’s lab firmly intends to be exactly that,” she said.
A&M is quickly emerging as one of the leaders in research in health science and the field of biomedical science has just exploded, said Dr. Michael McKinney, chancellor of Texas A&M University System.
“This is life-changing research,” McKinney said of Prockop’s work.
The thrill of the hunt is what drives the scientists and researchers, he said, but it also creates wealth, by creating jobs through the creation of new industries.
Four to five years ago this was an empty 500,000-square-foot building, said Dr. Alfred Knight, president and CEO of Scott & White.
“Our goal, with our partners, is to truly build this as a bioscience mecca,” he said. “We can do it, we can educate, we can produce the next generation’s workforce.”
The Institute of Regenerative Medicine is made up 13 labs where the focus is on developing treatments using adult stem cells for a variety of chronic ailments, including, heart and lung diseases, brain defects, strokes, multiple sclerosis and more.
jgibbs@temple-telegram.com
