Intuitive Machines partners with Houston college for workforce training

space training

Intuitive Machines, Rhodium Scientific and San Jacinto College will partner to train future workers for space-based pharma recovery. Photo courtesy Intuitive Machines.

Intuitive Machines, a Houston-based space technology, infrastructure and services company, has forged a partnership with San Jacinto College to develop a program for training workers to handle biopharmaceutical materials delivered to Earth on Intuitive Machines’ re-entry vehicle.

Intuitive Machines is working with biotech company Rhodium Scientific on the project. Rhodium, also based in Houston, is developing biomanufacturing payloads for Intuitive Machines’ re-entry vehicle.

“Delivering life-improving pharmaceuticals from orbit is only valuable with reliable recovery and processes on Earth,” Tim Crain, chief technology officer at Intuitive Machines, said in a news release. “That requires more than a spacecraft — it demands the workforce, facilities, and regulatory alignment to support safe, repeatable operations. San Jacinto College has the credibility and technical depth to make this vision a reality.”

San Jacinto College provides training certified by the National Institute for Bioprocessing Research and Training. Christopher Wild, assistant vice chancellor and vice president of biotechnology at San Jacinto College, said that with this certification and the college’s presence at Houston Spaceport, the school “is uniquely positioned to train the workforce needed (for) commercial space-based pharma recovery.”

The first-phase grant supporting Intuitive Machines’ Earth re-entry program will culminate in a full-scale mockup tailored to real payloads and use cases in early 2026.

Intuitive Machines said the collaborations with San Jacinto College and Rhodium “aim to align future landing infrastructure, research opportunities, and funding pathways that deliver lasting economic impact from space.”

From Your Site Articles
March Biosciences' oversubscribed raise brought in $28.4 million of financing with Mission BioCapital and 4BIO Capital leading the pack of investors. Photo via Getty Images

Clinical-stage Houston cell therapy company closes $28.4M oversubscribed series A

cha-ching

An emerging biotech company in Houston has closed its series A with outsized success.

March Biosciences' oversubscribed raise brought in $28.4 million of financing with Mission BioCapital and 4BIO Capital leading the pack of investors. The company has now raised more than $51 million in total.

Last year, March Biosciences announced its strategic alliance with CTMC (Cell Therapy Manufacturing Center), a joint venture between MD Anderson Cancer Center and National Resilience. CEO Sarah Hein met her co-founder, Max Mamonkin, at the TMC Accelerator for Cancer Therapeutics. Along with fellow co-founder Malcolm Brenner, March Biosciences launched from the Center for Cell and Gene Therapy (Baylor College of Medicine, Houston Methodist Hospital and Texas Children’s Hospital). Its goal is to fight cancers that have been unresponsive to existing immunotherapies using its lead asset, MB-105.

An autologous CD5-targeted CAR-T cell therapy, MB-105 is currently in phase-1 trials in patients with refractory T-cell lymphoma and leukemia. The treatment is showing signs of being both safe and effective, meriting a phase-2 trial that will begin early next year. The funds raised from the series A will help to finance the Phase 2 clinical development of MB-105 to expand on the existing data with optimized manufacturing processes.

“This oversubscribed financing enables us to advance our first-in-class CAR-T therapy, MB-105, into a Phase 2 trial for T-cell lymphoma – an indication with an exceptionally poor prognosis and few treatment options,” says Hein. “With the support and confidence of our investors, we are not only advancing our lead program but also expanding our pipeline, underscoring our commitment to delivering best-in-class therapies to patients that can change the treatment paradigm for these challenging cancers.”

But that’s not the only exciting news that Hein and her associates have to report. March Biosciences has recently partnered with cell therapy venture studio, Volnay Therapeutics. Led by highly experienced cell therapy development veterans, the March Biosciences team will work to develop a scalable manufacturing process for MB-105 that will lead to commercialization. Volnay co-founder and CEO Stefan Wildt, who held key R&D leadership positions in cell and gene therapy units at Novartis and Takeda, has also joined the board of March Biosciences. The board of directors is also welcoming Cassidy Blundell of Mission BioCapital and Owen Smith of 4BIO Capital.

“The team at March Biosciences is leveraging powerful science and promising clinical data to tackle cancers with significant unmet need,” says Blundell, a partner at Mission BioCapital. “We're excited to support their journey and believe their focused approach with MB-105 could lead to significant breakthroughs in the CAR-T space.”

The Houston-born company, which is a finalist for the 2024 Houston Innovation Awards, continues to accelerate quickly, in part thanks to its home base. After all, existing local investors like TMC Venture Fund also participated in the new raise. As Hein said last year, “Working with partners here in Houston, we have all the pieces and the community rises to the occasion to support you.”

CellChorus created a visualization AI program that helps scientists to better understand the functioning of cells, including their activation, killing and movement. Photo via Getty Images

Houston health tech startup scores $2.5M SBIR grant to advance unique cell therapy AI technology

fresh funding

A Houston biotech company just announced a new award of $2.5 million.

CellChorus, a spinoff of the Single Cell Lab at the University of Houston, announced the fresh funding, which comes from an SBIR (Small Business Innovation Research) grant from the National Institute of Health (NIH) through its National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS).

CellChorus is the business behind a technology called TIMING, which stands for Time-lapse Imaging Microscopy In Nanowell Grids. It’s a visualization AI program that helps scientists to better understand the functioning of cells, including their activation, killing and movement. This more in-depth knowledge of immune cells could be instrumental in developing novel therapies in countless disorders, including cancers and infectious diseases.

“While many cell therapies have been approved and are in development, the industry needs an integrated analytical platform that provides a matrix of functional readouts, including cell phenotype and metabolism on the same cells over time,” Rebecca Berdeaux, vice president of science at CellChorus, says in a press release. “We are grateful to NCATS for its support of the development of application-specific kits that apply dynamic, functional single-cell analysis of immune cell phenotype and function. The product we will develop will increase the impact of these therapies to improve the lives of patients.”

A two-year, $2.1 million Phase II grant will begin after the company achieves predetermined milestones under a $350,000 Phase I grant that is currently taking place. As Berdeaux explained, the funds will be used to develop TIMING kits which will manufacture analytics that provide end-users with rapid, specific and predictive results to accelerate translational research and the development and manufacture of more effective cell therapies.

TIMING is more than a great idea whose time has yet to come. It has already been proven in great depth. In fact, last June, CellChorus CEO Daniel Meyer told InnovationMap that he was initially attracted to the technology because it was “very well validated.” At the time, CellChorus had just announced a $2.3 million SBIR Fast-Track grant from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences. The company also went on to win an award in the Life Science category of the 2023 Houston Innovation Awards.

That confirmation of success comes from more than 200 peer-reviewed papers that describe myriad cell types and types of therapy, all of which used data from TIMING assays. TIMING data has benefited industry leaders in everything from research and clinical development to manufacturing. With the new grant, TIMING will become more widely available to scientists making important discoveries relating to the inner workings of the cells that drive our immunity.

OncoResponse in partnership with MD Anderson Cancer Center received a portion of $73 million the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas has doled out this spring. Photo via oncoresponse.com

Seattle biotech co. to move to Houston thanks to $13.3M grant from Texas organization

CPRIT funding spotted

A biotech company has landed a more than $13 million grant from the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas.

The nearly $13.3 million grant given to OncoResponse — which is relocating from Seattle to Houston, according to CPRIT's news release — will help the company develop fully human monoclonal antibodies for treatment of cancer that otherwise would not respond to immunotherapy. OncoResponse already has a partnership with MD Anderson Cancer Center, which is one of the company’s investors.

“We are thrilled to receive this recognition from CPRIT in supporting the potential of our immunotherapy candidate OR502. We greatly appreciate the additional support from our investors as we continue to make significant progress with our drug development efforts advancing immunotherapies derived from clues of Elite Responders,” says Clifford Stocks, CEO of OncoResponse, in a news release.

Aside from the grant, OncoResponse just hauled in $14 million from existing investors in a round led by RiverVest Venture Partners. Other participants in the series D round include Venture Partners, Canaan Partners, 3B Future Health Fund, Bering Capital, Takeda Ventures, and InterVest Capital Partners.

To date, OncoResponse has raised more than $180 million, according to market research company CB Insights.

A representative of OncoResponse couldn’t be reached for comment about the company’s relocation to Houston.

MD Anderson and Seattle-based Theraclone Sciences launched OncoResponse in 2015. Rice University was among the inaugural investors.

OncoResponse’s OR2805 immunotherapy product is being evaluated in a Phase 1 clinical trial. It’s the company’s leading immunotherapy candidate. OncoResponse is also working on OR502, an antibody being prepared for investigational and clinical studies.

“The modern treatment of cancer activates the body’s own immune system to attack cancer,” OncoResponse says in a summary posted on the website of the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT).

“These treatments, called immunotherapy, may not be successful if the cancer can recruit bad-acting cells, such as tumor associated macrophages, or TAMs, that create barriers preventing immunotherapies from activating the body’s own defenses against the cancer. To find drugs that may help counteract these TAMs, OncoResponse looked to patients who had responded very well to immunotherapy to see if their bodies made factors to block TAMs and helped them fight their cancers.”

OncoResponse’s OR502 prevents TAMs from shutting down the body’s response to cancer, thus restoring tumor-killing immune activity, CPRIT explains.

In addition to OncoResponse, recent CPRIT grant recipients from the Houston area are:

  • Houston-based 7 Hills Pharma, $13,439,001. The company is working on immunotherapies for treatment of cancer and prevention of infectious diseases.
  • Houston-based Allterum Therapeutics, $11,721,150. The company is coming up with an antibody for treatment of patients with acute lymphoblastic leukemia. This type of cancer affects blood and bone marrow.
  • Houston-based Cell Therapy Manufacturing Center, $9.1 million. The center is a joint venture between National Resilience and MD Anderson Cancer Center that is developing cell therapy manufacturing technologies to support biotech partnerships.
  • Houston-based Pulmotect, $8,851,165. The company’s PUL-042 product is aimed at treating and preventing respiratory complications in cancer patients.
  • Cancer researcher Michael King, $6 million. The grant helped lure King to Rice from Nashville’s Vanderbilt University, where he’s been the chair of biomedical engineering. King’s lab at Vanderbilt has been testing therapies for metastatic breast cancer and prostate cancer.
  • Missouri City-based OmniNano Pharmaceuticals, $2,711,437. The pharmatech company is working on two drugs for treatment of solid tumors in patients with pancreatic cancer.

“Texas is unique because of CPRIT’s ability to invest in cutting-edge research when private capital is scarce. This is yet another way Texas is leading the nation in the fight against cancer,” Wayne Roberts, CEO of CPRIT, says in a news release.

Ad Placement 300x100
Ad Placement 300x600

CultureMap Emails are Awesome

Property Showcase

Italian aerospace company sets up first U.S. office at Houston Spaceport

welcome to houston

Como, Italy-based aerospace company Involve Space recently made the Houston Spaceport the site of its first U.S. office.

Involve Space develops high-altitude balloon platforms for Earth observation, scientific research and hardware testing. The balloons carry instruments into the stratosphere (a layer of the upper atmosphere) to collect images and data, conduct experiments and test technology.

The company plans to launch its first commercial missions from Houston by the end of this year, according to a news release.

“Houston is the global center of aerospace, and our presence at Houston Spaceport strengthens our international growth trajectory,” Jonathan Polotto, founder and CEO of Involve Space, said in the release.

Founded in 2021, Involve Space incorporates aerospace hardware, AI and geospatial tools into its offerings. Its proprietary CLEAR platform uses conversational AI to help customers interpret data and support decision-making.

Located at Ellington Airport, the Houston Spaceport provides a base for Involve Space’s North American operations, including business development and partnerships with aerospace companies and researchers.

Other tenants at the Houston Spaceport include NASA, Axiom Space, Venus Aerospace and Intuitive Machines.

Involve Space’s relationship with the Houston Spaceport began in January 2025, when it conducted its first U.S. pilot launch. During the five-hour mission, the balloon reached an altitude of about 85,000 feet and traveled about 250 miles across Texas.

One of Involve Space’s first U.S. customers is Houston-based Rhodium Scientific, a space biotech company. Polotto and Rhodium Scientific founder and CEO Olivia Gamez Holzhaus signed a deal to conduct biotech experiments aboard Involve Space’s stratospheric balloon platforms before planned missions to orbit.

“The presence of innovative platforms like those developed by Involve strengthens the Spaceport’s role as a site for testing, validating, and deploying advanced technologies between aeronautics and space,” Jim Szczesniak, director of aviation for Houston Airports, added in the release.

UH lands $3M grant to expand opioid overdose training

Overdose Response

The University of Houston has received a $3 million federal grant to expand its potentially life-saving overdose response training program.

The grant will support the Houston Health Department’s FRONTLINES program that trains first responders in Harris and Fort Bend counties to recognize opioid overdoses and administer the drug naloxone, which can counter the effects of an opioid overdose. The four-year grant comes from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration within the Department of Health and Human Services, and it builds on eight years of work at UH, according to a release from the university.

As part of the expansion, UH medical, social work and psychology students will now also be able to take part in FRONTLINES’ overdose-response training. Some of the students will also be selected to help train community members, ultimately passing along the life-saving skills throughout Houston.

FRONTLINES is a collaboration with the City of Houston, the Fertitta College of Medicine, Baylor College of Medicine and the Houston Recovery Center. It was co-founded by Dr. James Bray, chair of the Department of Behavioral and Social Sciences at the University of Houston’s Tilman J. Fertitta Family College of Medicine, in 2018.

“When someone experiencing an opioid overdose is reached in time, naloxone can save their life,” Bray said in a news release. “We’ve seen the impact this training can have in Houston, and now we have an opportunity to extend that reach across Harris and Fort Bend counties, putting lifesaving knowledge and tools into the hands of more first responders.”

In 2024, around 450 residents of Harris County died from opioid overdoses, according to a Texas Department of State Health Services report. The report found that fentanyl was involved in about three-quarters of the deaths.

In 2025, UH also received a $2.6 million gift from the estate of Dr. William A. Gibson to expand its opioid research and develop a vaccine to help block fentanyl's effectiveness in entering the brain. The vaccine research is part of the Michael C. Gibson Addiction Research Program led by UH professor of psychology Therese Kosten and founding member of the UH Drug Discovery Institute Colin Haile. Read more about the grant and the vaccine’s development here.

Texas public libraries drive billions in economic impact, report finds

Beyond the Stacks

A new statewide study examining the economic impacts of public libraries has revealed they have generated over $3.8 billion in value to local communities — a return of $4.74 for every $1 invested.

The report, "Beyond the Stacks: Measuring the Economic and Community Value of Texas Public Libraries" was conducted by third-party consultancy JBK Economics Group in partnership with the Texas Library Association. About 300 of the total 513 public libraries in Texas participated in a survey for the report.

A major finding from the survey revealed that public libraries create billions in economic value for the communities they serve at a fraction of what it costs to pay employee wages and benefits, operating expenditures, and capital expenditures. About 11,200 jobs were directly and indirectly supported by public libraries, the report found.

The report found its $4.74 to $1 ratio by adding up the total value of the services provided by these institutions (an estimated $2.48 billion), and comparing it to total expenditures ($808.6 million).

"Public libraries had about the same economic footprint as the Texas motion picture and sound recording industry ($2.9 billion in Gross Domestic Product in 2024) or the Texas paper manufacturing industry ($4.0 billion in Gross Domestic Product in 2024)," the report said.

Many Houstonians are already familiar with Houston Public Library's expansive catalog and programming, but there are many more services the library provides that might fly under the radar. A few examples include access to subscription-based research databases and news outlets, and the Library of Things, a collection of cookware and bake ware, musical instruments, craft kits, and other tools or activity materials that are available for cardholders to borrow. Individual branches also provide free Wi-Fi, computer access, and meeting spaces.

Houston-area residents also have access to services at several other local libraries depending on their address, such as the Harris County Public Library, Montgomery County Memorial Library System, or Fort Bend County Libraries, just to name a few.

These are additional services and partnerships that Texas public libraries commonly provide, per the survey results:

  • 93 percent provide voter registration and/or serve as voting locations
  • 84 percent provide partnerships with local social services agencies
  • 82 percent provide job application assistance
  • 68 percent facilitate applications for government benefits
  • 38 percent provide on-site social services
  • 30 percent provide telehealth rooms and/or resources
"Public libraries are practical, welcoming and rooted in the communities they serve — they are unmistakably Texan," said Texas Library Association executive director Shirley Robinson in a press release. "This study puts a dollar value on the opportunities libraries create every day. Whether someone visits a library to apply for a job, access the internet, learn a new skill or simply find a new favorite book, those services create real value for Texans and their communities."

------

This article first appeared on CultureMap.com.

View All Listings