Global Health Emergency Innovation Ecosystem Technology Platform

TEXGHS is a consortium of academia, public, and private sector partners to support innovators working towards pandemic preparedness and response.

Lisa McDonald, MD, MSTC is the Principal Investigator and currently the Director of Healthcare at the Austin Technology Incubator. Dr. McDonald is an expert in pandemic response and recovery technologies.

COVID-19 has shed light on the need to build more resilient communities that are capable of responding to infectious disease threats. However, this conclusion is not new. Resilient communities and locally driven innovation ecosystems have long been the recommended course of action to address infectious disease. The World Health Organization (WHO) concluded that the world needs new models to fight pandemics that move beyond reliance on existing governmental and Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) programs. WHO recognized the important contribution of local factors to failures in outbreak response and recommended a locally driven strategy to support innovation in the fight against pandemic disease (WHO 2012).

Despite the success of our burgeoning healthcare and biotechnology cluster, the current pandemic revealed significant structural deficiencies at the local level that need to be remedied to increase resiliency and prepare for future disruptions to our economy. Since the beginning of the pandemic, statewide job losses have risen at an unprecedented rate (Kumar & Teng, 2020).  A statewide survey conducted by the United Way found many individuals experiencing difficulty addressing basic needs.  They are fearful of the impact of COVID-19 on their mental, physical and economic health (Dick, 2020). 

TEXGHS serves as a resource for the Texas innovation community by supporting the development of new technologies and the adaptation of existing technologies that address pandemic infectious disease threats. TEXGHS prioritizes support for projects that have both near term economic development benefit and direct health security improvement within the targeted communities where they will be deployed. This two-pronged evaluation is designed to ensure diverse, equitable and inclusive solutions have a predictable and beneficial outcome across the regions where they are deployed.  The targeted outcomes of the innovation ecosystem are economic development, equitable access to healthcare, and rapid response to pandemic threats. TEXGHS intends to engage with innovators through the following:

• Connecting scientific, research, and government assets with entrepreneurs and technologists to provide insight, expedite regulatory, approval and bring products to market quickly.

• Entrepreneurship Support through access to commercialization assets and expertise provided by the TEXGHS partners and the innovation ecosystem. 

• Regional, National & Government Connectivity by expanding our network of Ecosystem Partners. 

• Access to Capital through a series of ‘demonstration days’ to showcase the work of TEXGHS Innovators to the investment community. These demo days will be organized thematically across the TEXGHS focus areas.

The TEXGHS virtual innovation ecosystem is accessible to everyone across the globe under fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory terms.  The knowledge, databases, technology briefs, and access to innovators are the primary work products of TEXGHS that will be available as a public good.  The proposed platform is intended to be used by stakeholders and responders across the globe seeking vetted technologies that can be used effectively to reduce the transmission and spread of a pandemic in their home region or country.  The ecosystem exists to serve both users and innovators to rapidly develop and deploy technologies as part of a collaborative pandemic response.

COVID-19 has impacted humanity on a global-scale. We have seen that impact first-hand in our own Texas community. We will continue to partner with organizations and communities that are disproportionately impacted by COVID-19 to become advocates of new technology, to influence product development, and to shape a more equitable future. 

TEXGHS is successful in identifying, mentoring, and connecting numerous innovators with technologies developed to respond to the current pandemic.  In spring of 2020, as the economy was shutting down and TEXGHS was ramping up, Texas Air Industries formed as a joint development project between TEXGHS Ecosystem partners Panache Development and Industrial Genetics.  Texas Air Industries developed, piloted and commercialized an ozone disinfection system for commercial buildings.  TEXGHS is also working to support the International Society of Infectious Diseases (ISID) ProMED program by developing a sustainability plan for the organization.  ProMED is widely credited for the first reporting of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China. TEXGHS is working to develop a strategy for ISID to continue their critically important work in a self-sustaining manner.  TEXGHS Innovators have received thousands of hours of mentoring, incubation, investor meetings, pilot opportunities and subject matter expertise across the innovation ecosystem.

The early months of the performance period will be directed towards refining the technology focus areas and recruiting innovators and entrepreneurs that align with that focus. Shortly thereafter TEXGHS will develop the collaboration platform, as well as the data collection and reporting procedures needed to effectively capture and measure outputs of the TEXGHS innovation ecosystem. Finally, the remainder of the performance period will be used to evaluate and onboard prospective technologies and entrepreneurial teams who will ultimately be introduced to our closely curated investor network.

TEXGHS will work on specific projects to connect to the community, to encourage economic development through the commercialization of technology solutions, to grant equitable access of healthcare innovations to underserved populations, and to promote a rapid response to pandemic health threats. This will greatly enhance the health resiliency of the community. 

The evaluation metrics that TEXGHS has identified for the proposed project are  presented below. The first four metrics are directly aligned with the reporting metrics of the entrepreneurship and resiliency themes in our regional economic development priorities.  These outcomes are intended to drive impact in the creation of pandemic-related innovation and entrepreneurship and track the economic development, recovery, and resiliency of the ecosystem.

Metrics: 

# New firms created each year

#  and value of venture capital investments

# Patents awarded to intellectual property owners

# Jobs created through expansion of existing businesses

# Startups Reviewed

# Startups admitted and incubated

# Pilot projects conducted

# Events held (including number of participants)

# New partnerships formed

# Startup exits (mergers, acquisitions and IPOs)

# Business failures (number of incubated companies that have ceased operating)

# Entrepreneurs and interns from under-represented innovator populations

Based upon our internal research conducted through both stakeholder interviews of the TEXGHS ecosystem and outward facing risk analysis, the barriers to accomplishing our goals over the next one to three years are as follows:

1. Cultural- Volunteer fatigue and burnout, limiting efficacy of the organizational approach and participation in the ecosystem. 

2. Cultural- The overwhelming drive to return to normalcy might result in a desire to focus volunteer and innovator attention on topics unrelated to health security. In the past, this ‘drive to forget’ has undermined true effort to build a robust, resilient platform to respond to contemporary health security threats. 

3. Investment- As the pandemic moves slowly toward resolution, the investment community will lose interest in equity investment in technologies addressing health security and focus on ROI in an unrelated space. 

4. Innovator fatigue- If investment and attention to the health security space abates, new entrant innovators will focus their attention elsewhere. 

To mitigate these risks, TEXGHS will transition activities from pandemic response to infectious disease surveillance and monitoring, document lessons learned and collaborate with analogous organizations globally, engage in data gathering and analysis, influence government pandemic guidance and strategies and potentially pivot focus to other health crises.

University of Texas at Austin

Austin Technology Incubator

Technology solutions will be key in responding to the current and future pandemics.  Unfortunately, no global hub or ecosystem exists to coordinate, validate, and disseminate effective technologies available to the public for pandemic response.  We believe that a partnership with the Trinity Challenge members will facilitate our solution being both scaled and accessible on a global scale.

Trinity Challenge Member Organizations- BMGF, Microsoft, BlueDot- Organizations that fund in this space and have the global reach and technological acumen to collaborate on development of the collaboration platform).

Among our TEXGHS Ecosystem Partners and related organizations- Corecentra (Social Impact Metrics), Global Health Security Network (Subject Matter Expertise and Global Scale), Ending Pandemics (Health Security Metrics) and IDEO Foundation (Platform Design) will all be important partners to design, develop and deploy the technology platform.