S.A. medical industry gets infusion of leadership
BYLINE: David Hendricks
On Friday, Ramiro Cavazos was roasted mercilessly -- and praised to the hilt -- by fellow city officials.
That was all about Cavazos' six years as city economic development director. Did he really call that many meetings that he did not himself attend? Is Cavazos that good at playing fantasy football while talking on the telephone? Can growing up in the Rio Grande Valley be an excuse for absolutely everything?
After the farewell luncheon at La Margarita Restaurant, Cavazos sat down to discuss his new job, likely the toughest one he has faced yet, with his 1-year-old son, Ramiro Jr., on his lap.
The future indeed is more important, after all.
Cavazos started work this week as director of research and economic development at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio. It's a new position at the Health Science Center, which along with UT-San Antonio is also hiring a technology transfer specialist.
Cavazos' page-long job description lists 10 specific duties. It boils down to finding money so research produced by the Health Science Center's talented and highly advanced faculty can be commercialized, benefiting both the researchers and the university with royalty revenue.
Cavazos will attempt this in two main ways. He must seek government grants and lobby for state legislative allocations. He also will try to find early-stage seed funding and venture capital so the Health Science Center faculty members can win patents and governmental approvals and pay for manufacturing of new medical products.
The second part will be more difficult. The complaint has long been that South Texas lacks angel and venture capital. More true is that the investment capital belongs to people who prefer to invest in something else, namely oil-and-gas and ranching activity that pays off in six months to a year.
The wealthy here are too restless for something like medical inventions that will take a decade to reach payday, even though the wealth it creates reverberates much wider in a community.
Cavazos, 45, knows this going in. "The environment is not there. The history in investing is not there," he acknowledged. "We'll have to start from ground zero. That is what energizes me."
Cavazos wants to build a network that stitches together investors, scientists and institutions like the Southwest Research Institute and the Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research, plus private companies like DPT Laboratories.
He will take ideas from other areas that successfully commercialize technical advances, such as North Carolina's Research Triangle, but he believes that San Antonio's process must be mostly customized.
The main challenge Cavazos sees is communication. He spoke of "those who work in separate silos," referring to researchers and capitalists. "I want to demystify and simplify," he said. "This is a different language that isn't getting across. My job is to connect the dots. I'm not coming in as a PhD or as a capitalist. I'm coming from the other side into the university environment. I will work to bridge the gaps."
Cavazos brings a track record of leadership that reveals his communication skills. In the early 1990s, he transformed the San Antonio Hispanic Chamber of Commerce from a social club to an economic development force.
Working for the city, he oversaw the writing of an economic development master plan called San Antonio Inc. that helps 64 organizations work toward the same goals and develop the best industries. He had a role in starting the San Antonio Technology Accelerator Initiative that brings inventors and investors together.
Cavazos also was the city's lead negotiator for incentives that helped land the Toyota assembly plant and its suppliers, along with numerous other business investments.
That gives him the experience to know what counts. "We'll need more local and outside money to be the national player we ought to be" in the medical industry, Cavazos said. "It will take San Antonio five to 15 years to be in the national scene."
That would make a difference. It may even make a difference for Ramiro Cavazos Jr.