Aerial view of Capitol building in Austin, Texas.
As Austin sets out to build a health innovation zone, one interesting development is how Merck figures into those plans. This week Texas Governor Greg Abbott confirmed that Merck would set up an IT hub, which is expected to create more than 600 jobs with the help of a $6 million Texas Enterprise Fund grant.
Clark Golestani, Global CIO at Merck, said the goal of the hub is to work with Dell Medical School at the University of Texas and Austin Healthcare Council to connect technology and science to produce medications and vaccines.
Austin would be the fourth IT hub Merck has set up in addition to locations in Branchburg, New Jersey, Prague and Singapore. These hubs seek to “break new ground” in digital health by supporting collaboration between the big pharma company, academia, and digital health startups.
Citing documents Merck filed with the city, an Austin Statesman article noted that Merck’s Branchburg hub hosts 150 to 200 workers from corporate partners such as Cognizant, Accenture and Ernst & Young.
It will be interesting to see how Merck’s hub fits into Capital City Innovation’s plans for the Austin Health Innovation Zone. The nonprofit’s founding members include the University of Texas at Austin, Central Health, and Seton Healthcare Family, a faith-based, nonprofit health system that’s also a member of Catholic nonprofit health system Ascension. The hub makes the pharma company well positioned to weigh in on conversations centered on the future of healthcare beyond the SxSW Interactive festival but also play a vital role in providing a pharma tenant in the health innovation zone, especially given the continued advancement of digital health to make clinical trial recruitment and management more efficient.
Photo: dszc, Getty Images
