Contact: Will Sansom
Phone: 210-567-2579
E-mail: sansom@uthscsa.edu

Three years after its launch, the San Antonio Life Sciences Institute (SALSI) is off to a robust start with more than 70 research papers published and with SALSI seed funding already being leveraged into multiple new or pending grant awards.

Philanthropist Dan Parman; Sen. Leticia Van de Putte; Ricardo Romo, Ph.D., president of the University of Texas at San Antonio; and Francisco G. Cigarroa, M.D., president of the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio.
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Francisco G. Cigarroa, M.D., president of The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, and Ricardo Romo, Ph.D., president of The University of Texas at San Antonio, reported the good news at a briefing April 18 at the UTSA 1604 Campus.

The 77th Legislature authorized the creation of SALSI under the leadership of Sen. Leticia Van de Putte and Rep. Robert Puente. Co-authors included then-Rep. Elizabeth Ames Jones and Reps. Trey Martinez Fischer, Jose Menendez and Mike Villarreal.

Multidisciplinary research
SALSI provides impetus for researchers in biology, computer science, engineering and other disciplines at UTSA to conduct multidisciplinary research with scientists in biochemistry, cellular and structural biology, aging, pharmacology and other disciplines at the Health Science Center.

New degree programs
SALSI also is expected to result in new collaborative degree programs in critical disciplines. The first is a graduate degree program in biomedical engineering.


The SALSI model has been adopted by The University of Texas System as a model program for interaction between a health component and an academic campus, President Cigarroa said. This partnership has also led to the two institutions collaborating in the arena of intellectual property that will benefit the entire region. “These successes position SALSI for even more collaboration in the future,” he said. “Given that competition for National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding is only getting stiffer, we as a city need to work harder and smarter to make sure that we get our share of the funding. SALSI is an example of how we are working smarter to make this happen.”

Targeted areas of SALSI include bioengineering, bioterrorism, health disparities and neuroscience. Dr. Cigarroa noted that the NIH Roadmap for Medical Research emphasizes multidisciplinary studies in these and many other areas, exactly what SALSI is fueling.

Fueling biotechnology industry
Established in 2003 with $4.5 million in funding from UTSA, UTHSC and The University of Texas System, SALSI is designed to develop initiatives that will fuel the growth of San Antonio’s $14 billion biomedical and biotechnology industry and foster commercialization of the products of research at both institutions.

SALSI funding has helped support 25 collaborative research projects involving faculty from both institutions, resulting in 73 scientific publications and 10 new or pending grant awards.

The initiative is also supported by Dan Parman, a local businessman who made the first philanthropic donation to SALSI for a Voice Communication Center after being successfully treated for an illness-related impairment of his voice. The SALSI-supported center brings together researchers from a variety of disciplines at both institutions to better understand the complex issues of the human voice.

SALSI, a first-of-its-kind institution in Texas, was created by the Legislature in coordination with The University of Texas System Board of Regents and relies on the initiative and close collaboration of researchers and faculty members working at UTSA and the Health Science Center.

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The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio is the leading research institution in South Texas and one of the major health sciences universities in the world. With an operating budget of $536 million, the Health Science Center is the chief catalyst for the $14.3 billion biosciences and health care sector in San Antonio’s economy. The Health Science Center has had an estimated $35 billion impact on the region since inception and has expanded to six campuses in San Antonio, Laredo, Harlingen and Edinburg. More than 22,000 graduates (physicians, dentists, nurses, scientists and allied health professionals) serve in their fields, including many in Texas. Health Science Center faculty are international leaders in cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, aging, stroke prevention, kidney disease, orthopaedics, research imaging, transplant surgery, psychiatry and clinical neurosciences, pain management, genetics, nursing, allied health, dentistry and many other fields.