Report: Houston to see highest concentration of medical office project completions this year

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One of Houston's biggest medical office projects — the $1.3 billion, 400,000-square-foot O’Quinn Medical Tower — is expected to deliver this year. Photo courtesy of Baylor College of Medicine

Medical office and life sciences projects are making a big splash in Houston’s commercial real estate sector in 2023.

The 42Floors commercial real estate website ranks five Houston-area medical office buildings among the country’s 20 largest medical office projects set to open this year. Meanwhile, 42Floors identifies two Houston developments among the 20 biggest U.S. life sciences projects on tap to debut in 2023.

Leading the list of the largest U.S. medical office buildings scheduled to be completed this year is the $1.3 billion, 400,000-square-foot O’Quinn Medical Tower. Set to open April 14 at the McNair Campus of Baylor St. Luke’s Medical Center, the outpatient facility will adjoin the McNair Hospital Tower, which opened in 2019.

The O’Quinn tower will serve as the new clinical home of the Dan L Duncan Comprehensive Cancer Center. The center is a federally designated facility for cancer care and research.

Highlights of the 12-story O’Quinn tower, southeast of the Texas Medical Center, include:

  • Ambulatory surgery center with 12 operating rooms and 10 endoscopy suites
  • 80-bay setup for infusion therapy
  • More than 70 exam rooms
  • More than 850 parking spaces

In all, five medical office properties in the Houston area made the 42Floors list, representing the highest concentration of major projects in any U.S. metro area that are scheduled to open this year. The four medical office properties joining the O’Quinn tower on the list are:

  • Houston Methodist Sugar Land Medical Office Building 4, 159,252 square feet
  • Kelsey-Seybold Springwoods Village Campus, 157,983 square feet
  • Kelsey-Seybold Ambulatory Surgery Center in Clear Lake, 116,000 square feet
  • 1715 Project in Friendswood, 107,000 square feet

A separate 42Floors list ranks Dynamic One, part of Baylor College of Medicine’s TMC Helix Park, as the second largest life sciences project in the U.S. set to come online this year. Houston’s TMC3 Collaborative Building lands at No. 19.

The 12-story Dynamic One project will feature lab space, offices, restaurants, and stores. It represents the first of four buildings planned for the 37-acre, five-million-square-foot TMC Helix Park, which is projected to generate an economic impact of $5.4 billion.

The 42Floors list puts the square footage of Dynamic One’s north tower at 365,000. Organizations involved in the project cite the square footage as 355,000.

The Baylor College of Medicine has signed up as Dynamic One’s anchor tenant. It will occupy 114,000 square feet of lab and office space.

“Baylor College of Medicine is a major force in life sciences discovery and commercialization at TMC. Their move to TMC Helix Park will serve as a catalyst for enhanced collaboration with TMC’s other esteemed Institutions, as well as with industry leaders from around the world,” Bill McKeon, president and CEO of TMC, says in a news release.

Also located at TMC Helix Park, the four-story TMC3 Collaborative Building will span 250,000 square feet. It will contain research facilities for MD Anderson Cancer Center, the Texas A&M University Health Science Center, the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, and TMC.

In addition, the TMC3 Collaborative Building will house life sciences companies, the TMC Data Collaborative, the TMC Venture Fund, the Braidwell hedge fund, and venture capital and private equity firms.

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The new tower will be home of the Dan L Duncan Comprehensive Cancer Center. Photo courtesy of Baylor College of Medicine

Pivotal new cancer research tower tops off in the Texas Medical Center

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Anew structure aimed at greatly expanding medical services and outpatient care to residents of Greater Houston recently topped off.

At an official ceremony attended by VIPs and industry names, Baylor St. Luke's Medical Center toasted the completion of the concrete structure pivotal in the construction of the O'Quinn Medical Tower at the McNair Campus.

This new 12-story O'Quinn Medical Tower at Baylor St. Luke's - McNair Campus will be the new clinical home for the Dan L Duncan Comprehensive Cancer Center, per a release. The center is nationally ranked for cancer care by U.S. News & World Report and is one of only three National Cancer Institute-designated comprehensive cancer centers in Texas. It earned that designation through Baylor College of Medicine.

Additionally, the O'Quinn Medical Tower is part of the expanding McNair Campus. This campus promises more than 400,000 square feet of space to support and provide personalized care to patients and families, including another hospital bed tower and ambulatory care center, press materials describe.

Those familiar with the area will recognize that the campus sits directly adjacent to the planned site of TMC3, a new 37-acre campus that will be located between Old Spanish Trail and Brays Bayou.

"The new O'Quinn Tower and its designation as the clinical home of Baylor's Dan L Duncan Comprehensive Cancer Center will be an important milestones in Baylor's mission," said Dr. Paul Klotman, president, CEO and executive dean of Baylor College of Medicine, in a release. "The McNair Campus is the hub of our clinical activity, and we look forward to the continued expansion."

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This article originally ran on CultureMap.

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Rice student startup lands $1.85M to launch medical drone network

critical cargo

Students at Rice University have developed a medical cargo drone transport system to help deliver sensitive medical supplies and improve mobile healthcare efforts.

Haast Autonomous is the brainchild of graduating seniors Ege Halac, Jason Chen and Santiago Brent, who got their venture idea off the ground with help from the Liu Idea Lab for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (Lilie) Summer Venture Studio. The founders have developed the prototype at Rice’s Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen (OEDK) with fellow Rice researchers Felix Hasson, Ethan Javedan, Kenna Sanders and Caden Schmidt.

The startup has raised $1.85 million in pre-seed funding, according to Rice. The founders plan to focus on Haast full-time following graduation. They said they aim to launch pilot trials in 2027 and head to market later that year.

“We need better alternatives for a fast, safe and on-demand system of transport for life-critical cargo,” Halac said in a news release from Rice.

The Haast team has developed a custom aircraft with software that manages dispatch, routes, and chain of custody to assist in how materials move between sites in centralized medical systems. Generally, the transportation of medical supplies and materials between facilities and points of care relies on ground shipping or expensive air transport.

Haast Autonomous’ aircraft can take off and land vertically, and is designed around a mission profile of 50 to 62 miles. It can carry a payload of at least 5 pounds, with future versions intended to scale up in size. It also includes a built-in payload bay that regulates temperature, pressure, vibration and tilt to protect sensitive contents such as patient samples, antivenom or poisoning kits and radioligands or other therapies, according to Rice.

At first, the company envisioned the mission to be centered around transplants, but saw the product being best suited for a variety of operations.

“What we realized is that the platform we are building is suited for medicine, but it really underlies a much larger problem of mission-critical transport across industries,” Brent added in the news release. “We are building the fastest, most secure logistics chain for the world’s most sensitive cargo.”

Haast Autonomous was recognized at the 2026 Oshman Engineering Design Showcase and Competition, where it won Best Aerospace or Transportation Technology. It also performed well in the 2026 Napier Rice Launch Challenge.

In the future, Haast Autonomous plans to deploy a fleet of aircraft. The software will be designed to assist hospitals in requesting flights and tracking deliveries in real time.

“The drone is only part of the solution,” Chen also added in the release. “What matters is moving something from point A to point B in a way that fits into how hospitals already operate.”

Houston scientist wins prestigious Pew Scholar award for brain cancer research

standout scholar

Christina Tringides, an assistant professor of materials science and nanoengineering at Rice University, is one of 21 scientists to win a prestigious Pew Biomedical Scholar award.

She is the first faculty member from Rice to win the distinction, which provides $300,000 over four years for advances in biomedicine, according to the university. The awards are granted to researchers who are in the first few years at the assistant professor level.

In Tringides’ case, the funding will support her innovative new method of modeling glioblastoma, a common and extremely aggressive form of brain cancer. Thanks to producing its own blood supply, glioblastoma spreads quickly, weaving tendrils of blighted tissue throughout the brain. Because of this, surgery is difficult and conventional therapies ineffective.

Understanding the way glioblastoma spreads is crucial to the search for a cure. Tringides is using hydrogels that mimic the brain’s extracellular matrix. Using cultures and a microscopic labyrinth, her team can see how the cancer spreads, bonds with neurons and changes cell wall activity. Essentially, Tringides has devised an intelligence test for tumors in hopes of learning how to outsmart them.

“As cancer crawls through the maze, we can look at how it is interacting with the neurons more and more, and measure how electrical activity is changing as a result,” she said in a news release from Rice.

Examining how cancer cells grow can reveal which conditional changes slow them down. Finding ways to alter the structure of brain matter in a way that makes it inhospitable to the cancer could lead to therapies that would impede growth or even reverse it. Using her custom-made ersatz brain maze makes it easier to observe changes than it would be in a patient’s brain.

“Imaging synapses is time-intensive ⎯ it can involve large data files that are hard to visualize, but if we know that the only place where we might have a synapse is this tiny 1-by-4-by-10 micron channel, it makes it much faster and reliable to image them,” Tringides said.

Born in Ames, Iowa, Tringides received her doctorate in biophysics from Harvard before joining Rice in 2024 through a Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT) recruitment award.

Her research was also one of the first four projects to receive research awards through the Rice Brain Institute and TMC Neuro Collaboration Seed Grant Program.

Texas residents earn 11th highest income in U.S., says 2026 study

Money Matters

A new WalletHub study comparing income disparities across America has ranked Texas residents No. 11 on the list of states with the highest earning residents in the nation.

The report, "States Where People Have the Highest Income (2026)," analyzed U.S. Census Bureau income data in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The report evaluated the average annual income of the top five percent, the median annual household income, and the average annual income of the bottom 20 percent of residents in every state, all adjusted for the cost of living.

The report's data revealed the top five percent of Texans, the highest earners, make $520,378 on average yearly after adjusting for the cost of living. That's the seventh-highest income among the top five percent of earners nationwide.

Meanwhile, the median annual income of a Texas household is just under $76,000. The bottom 20 percent of Texas residents make $17,651 a year, the report found.

For additional context, the latest data from the Federal Reserve shows an American household's median yearly income is about $83,700. WalletHub analyst Chip Lupo also found that the highest earning 10 percent of individuals in the U.S. earn over 12 times more than those in the lowest-earning 10 percent, based on the latest Census data.

"By measuring the income of various percentiles against a state's median income, we can better identify where income disparities are more prevalent, which could help us better understand why residents of certain states struggle more to make ends meet," said Lupo.

Virginia is the state where residents earn the highest income in the U.S., WalletHub said. Based on the report's findings, the top five percent of Virginians make $545,097 on average per year after adjusting for the cost of living. The median annual income of a Virginia household comes out to $95,339, and the bottom 20 percent of residents make $19,671 annually on average.

Conversely, West Virginia is the state where people have the lowest income in the U.S. A West Virginia household makes a median annual income of $56,610, the third-lowest nationally, and the bottom 20 percent of residents make $13,260 on average per year, which is the fifth-lowest in the nation. The top five percent of West Virginians make $372,218 on average per year.

The top 10 states where residents have the highest income are:

  • No. 1 – Virginia
  • No. 2 – New York
  • No. 3 – New Jersey
  • No. 4 – Washington
  • No. 5 – Connecticut
  • No. 6 – Utah
  • No. 7 – Colorado
  • No. 8 – Minnesota
  • No. 9 – Illinois
  • No. 10 – Massachusetts

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This article originally appeared on CultureMap.com.

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