Houston Is Building A Workforce To Solidify Its Life Sciences Ecosystem
Houston added 1M SF of high-end lab space to its inventory over the past two years, but the emerging market is still far from the life sciences industry’s field of dreams, sitting at 23% vacant.
That's partially because life sciences companies and researchers require an ecosystem of education, collaboration and workforce development. And while the city is making strides, the workforce part of the equation is a work in progress, panelists said at Bisnow’s Houston Life Sciences Conference Tuesday.
After losing a major opportunity in the recent past due to its lack of workforce, higher education institutions are stepping up to train local students to fill that gap. Real estate developers, governments, the medical industry and businesses are joining forces to build the ecosystem necessary to become a top U.S. life sciences market.
The collaboration has seen some success. Houston had the second-highest rate of life sciences employment growth from 2022 to 2023, according to CBRE's 2025 life sciences outlook. CBRE also reported Houston was a top-ranked talent cluster last year for all three industry segments: research and development, manufacturing and medtech.
But that doesn’t mean companies have come clamoring for the newly built space, at least not yet, despite offering more greenfield space to build life sciences facilities than the big three markets of Boston, San Francisco and San Diego.
Panelists said modern life sciences operations don’t exist in isolation.
“In theory, you can put these anywhere, but you need the labor force to make it happen,” McCord Development Life Sciences Lead and General Counsel Shawn Cloonan said at the event, held at The Westin Houston Medical Center.
Houston had 2.6M SF of life sciences inventory at the end of 2024, up from 1.6M SF at the end of 2022, according to CBRE. Among new deliveries were three buildings within Texas Medical Center: the 250K SF TMC3 Collaborative Building, the 350K SF Dynamic One and the 265K SF Levit Green Phase 1.
But the city saw just 85K SF of life sciences leasing in 2024, with only two other tenants in the market seeking about 80K SF, according to CBRE.
With a 23.4% vacancy rate, that means about 608K SF of life sciences space sits empty.
Commercial real estate players are looking to change that by “evangelizing” Texas as a life sciences and manufacturing destination, given its relative cost advantage and proximity to airports and seaports, Cloonan said.
Yet workforce remains one of the most important factors to site selection, as McCord Development saw when Amgen declined to build a $550M biomanufacturing facility in Houston in 2022, citing the lack of existing workforce training as a primary deciding factor.
That led McCord to partner with San Jacinto College and the National Institute for Bioprocessing Research and Training to build a Center for Biotechnology at Generation Park Campus, where classes should begin this year.
Other higher education institutions, including Alvin Community College, Texas A&M University and Lone Star College, are also working to support the industry's workforce development.
Lone Star College has had a biotechnology institute since 1995, but it pivoted its focus when it saw the opportunity for life sciences investment and jobs in the Houston area, Lone Star College Natural Sciences and Health Dean Mischelle Hopper said.
“It was a little bit more focused on things like alternative energy, algae, those kinds of things,” Hopper said. “In the last five years or so, we really had to do this pivot in what we're doing in our program. As a result, we've revamped our curriculum to speak more to the biomanufacturing piece.”
The institute is now heavily focused on research and biotechnology, she said. Students can go through the program and immediately be ready to “put their hands on machinery” and go to work, which companies like Bionova and Cellipont need, Hopper said.
Texas A&M offers a Texas regional industrial biomanufacturing education certification program, or TRIBEC, said Baley Reeves, director of the Texas A&M National Center for Therapeutics Manufacturing. The university also works with 12 different organizations supporting their workforce development and certification programs, she said.
“But in addition to that, we also offer TRIBEC on every single campus, so that we can collectively pool our annual throughput and start to create the workforce numbers that will start to move the needle inside selection committees,” Reeves said.
North Carolina has been successful in attracting biomanufacturing investments because it has a standard biomanufacturing training program in 13 different community colleges across the state. Texas could follow suit, she said.
“Working together across all of our institutions, pooling our resources, pooling our throughputs, those are going to start to create those conversations that can feed into the site selection committee needs and really better position Texas to be a player in the next biomanufacturing hub,” Reeves said. “But it's going to take us all working together.”
