Recent EDA visit a chance to showcase OKC’s bioscience cluster for potential grant

Oklahoma City recently got a quick visit from a high-ranking EDA official on a mission to find out more about a regional plan to expand the region’s bioscience industry.

The visit was made in response to a $500,000 planning grant the EDA awarded last fall as part of its Build Back Better Regional Challenge grant competition. OKC was one of just 60 applicants out of 529 in phase 1 to receive the $500,000 planning grant and an opportunity to compete for a much larger grant in phase 2. The EDA was allocated $1 billion in supplemental funding under the American Rescue Plan to assist communities nationwide in their efforts to rebuild their local economies resulting from the impact of the pandemic.

Oklahoma City’s application is for $55 million covering eight separate bioscience-related projects. That application was submitted this past March by the Greater Oklahoma City Chamber, who took a hands-on role to convene the multiple players involved in the phase application.

“We essentially served as the project manager and the convener behind the scenes [for the phase 2 application] to make sure each of the projects was well vetted and considered, and then the operational and budget components were put together,” said Jeff Seymour, the Chamber’s executive vice president of economic development.

Although the Chamber served as the project manager, Seymour said multiple partners provided leadership to drive and submit the eight projects, including the University of Oklahoma; the Stephenson Cancer Center; Tom Love Innovation Hub; Oklahoma State University, in collaboration with Oklahoma Pandemic Center for Innovation and Excellence; the Oklahoma City Innovation District; and the Norman Economic Development Coalition. Other partners included Echo Investment Capital; i2E; OCAST; Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation (OMRF); Chickasaw Nation; Oklahoma City Black Chamber; Cytovance Biologics; Latino Community Development Agency; and many others who combined to support the grant process.

“These projects looked at a couple different segments of work. One is how can we support new entrepreneurship and innovation within the bioscience industry? How can we create more lanes of commercialization and more support for entrepreneurs that have a good idea to bring those things to market? Second, how can we scale what is already here and be successful, particularly around translational research, clinical trials and also supporting bio-manufacturing, and how can we use that to support a domestic need in the U.S. to scale more production verses traditional offshore markets,” Seymour said.

Other work involves being able to produce a workforce for bio-manufacturing and building collaboratives to support the industry statewide.

As part of EDA Assistant Deputy Secretary Dennis Alvord’s tour, he learned more about each of the bioscience projects during a visit to the Stephenson Cancer Center in the Oklahoma City Innovation District, where he saw first hand some of the research occurring at the facility to cure and treat various forms of cancer. He next met with various city, university, bioscience, and business and industry officials, including Oklahoma City Mayor David Holt and Chamber President Roy Williams, for a roundtable discussion at OMRF to discuss the coalition’s implementation plan and to glean more information about the strong collaboration among the many partners from the region’s bioscience cluster.

Seymour stressed the EDA's visit was not necessarily an indication that OKC is in line to win a phase 2 grant, but it was a good experience nonetheless, he said.

This article originally appeared in the June 2022 edition of the VeloCity newsletter.