By Ann Tanabe, CEO BioHouston
Houston is home to the largest medical center in the world and is quickly becoming the Third Coast for life sciences. Here in Houston, the brightest minds in medicine have access to one of the highest densities of clinical facilities for patient care, basic science, and translational research. BioHouston leads the effort to establish our region as a vigorous global competitor in life science and biotechnology commercialization. In order to do this, we believe we must create and grow a true life science ecosystem.
While BioHouston’s activities are designed to ignite the growth of the industry as a whole, the success of this broad mission would not be possible without the help of focused social networks. Among these networks are those especially for entrepreneurs such as Enventure (student founded and lead) and the Houston chapter of the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs (SoPE). While SoPE is a national organization with chapters across the U.S., SoPE Houston supports our local entrepreneurs in every stage from idea to conception to exit, with the overall mission of turning ideas into innovation.
SoPE Houston’s educational programming, paired with their peer-to-peer network, fully supports and empowers the entrepreneurial spirit of biomedical and healthcare professionals, thus bringing great value to our ecosystem. This is especially evident in local entrepreneurial success stories such as Dr. Medhi Razavi (Texas Heart Institute) and Dr. Billy Cohn (Johnson & Johnson Center for Device Innovation). Both practicing physicians, Dr. Razavi has founded multiple medical device startups (Saranas and Nanolinea) and has over 20 patents to his name and Dr. Cohn is a serial entrepreneur and inventor with more than 90 US patents for his medical innovations.
The future is bright for life science in Houston and, with the help of partner organizations like SoPE, BioHouston looks forward to continuing to do our part to support this growth. To learn more about SoPE please visit www.sopenet.org.
