North Texas—and more specifically, Pegasus Park—has become the place for innovative thinkers to gather and bring into reality health solutions that promise to impact the world in a significant way. Biotech research in North Texas is booming and one of the major driving forces behind the development of Pegasus Park is Lyda Hill Philanthropies and LH Capital.

Last spring, Southwestern Medical Foundation launched “Learning From Leaders,” a monthly podcast that provides a platform for knowledge exchange, mentorship, and collaborative problem-solving. Hosted by Lili Clark, a member of The Cary Council, each episode fosters a unique learning experience packed with valuable insights, practical advice, and inspiring stories from seasoned community leaders. On a recent episode, Clark was joined by Nicole Small, CEO of Lyda Hill Philanthropies and LH Capital, and Matt Crommett, managing director at Lyda Hill Philanthropies, who oversees a portfolio of nature and science investments in grants. The trio discussed Pegasus Park, the 26-acre campus that has become a hotbed of biotech innovation and social impact. Read all about it below and learn even more by checking out the podcast, which is available on Apple, Spotify, and wherever you get podcasts.

Learning from Leaders host, Lili Clark, with Matt Crommett (center) and Nicole Small (right).

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Lili Clark: Describe Pegasus Park and its mission.

Nicole Small: Pegasus Park is a campus located near Dallas’ Central Business District and UT Southwestern that is dedicated to all things biotech, life sciences, and social innovation. Our main tower building houses the offices of more than 30 nonprofits, as well as UT Southwestern, a gene therapy company, and several other exciting businesses. Our shared wet lab facility, BioLabs, is located across campus and is where we host gatherings with startup life sciences companies.

LC: What is the history of the Pegasus Park campus?

NS: The building was originally built in 1970 by the Zale family as headquarters for Zale Corporation. It was featured in a movie in the 1970s, and there are all sorts of fun stories about diamond elevators. In 1981, it was sold to ExxonMobil, which vacated the campus in 2015. We embraced the opportunity to bring this iconic Dallas landmark back to life by redeveloping it into Pegasus Park.

Innovation districts like Pegasus Park must be located adjacent to important academic institutions, so we anchored our social innovation work in the nonprofit sector near UT Southwestern, one of the nation’s leading academic medical institutions. UT Southwestern is a leader in basic science research that is necessary to accelerate the pace of discovery and help move medical advancements from bench to bedside. Six UT Southwestern faculty have received Nobel Prizes, and their work and the work of other scientific leaders has enhanced health care and changed lives for countless people around the world.

Bringing great minds together in one place is inspiring. Pegasus Park is a meeting of the minds—all things innovation—whether you are a board member, a venture capitalist, a startup founder, or a nonprofit leader.

LC: Pegasus Park is a great example of a project that combines for-profit and nonprofit capital. Could you describe it and how it plays out in practice?

Matt Crommett: There is so much for-profit and nonprofit activity happening on campus, and it is illustrated by the tenants in this 18-story tower. One of the floors houses Health Wildcatters, an investment group that also runs an accelerator for health tech companies. We have investors who are seeking for-profit opportunities, and they come here to work together on health solutions. Our nonprofits on campus span different areas and fields, and each day they spend time together and “collide for impact.”

LC: Can you describe the “Water Cooler”?

NS: When we first envisioned Pegasus Park, we wanted to empower nonprofits to excel in their work. We have an outstanding group of nonprofits in our community with exceptional leaders who are experts in their space and are making great impact on our community.

In the nonprofit space, we tend to invest differently than in the for-profit space. We ask nonprofits to solve the world’s most difficult problems, but they are challenged on how to allocate capital. We ask many questions and constrain the capital. Donors will usually give a restricted gift, and many times nonprofits are not allowed to use that capital for people, space, or place because it must be used for the most innovative ideas. Then you must write a 150-page report.

It is not that nonprofits shouldn’t be held accountable and metrics-driven, but we found that many nonprofits we knew were really constrained by the basic things that a startup in the venture world would not be. In the venture world, you pay the best people and have access to the best technology.

We wanted to help supercharge any of the nonprofits that we worked with and create space to allow them to focus more on their mission and less on the things that don’t matter as much. We try to attract the best talent to occupy our space because we need the brightest minds to solve pressing issues like poverty and health equity. We believe if we create a place where people want to come to work, it would help attract human capital. By putting people in the same space, we wondered if work would get done faster, more efficiently, better, and differently.

Thus, the “Water Cooler” idea was born. It is a shared collaborative space aimed at helping organizations attract and retain talent and improve their collaboration. More than 30 nonprofits are housed on five floors in almost 200,000 square feet. Some spaces are small, and partner organizations might share space. Uplift Education takes up an entire floor. Several family foundations have moved into the building because they realized they could be close to the work and the people they are supporting, which creates a different dynamic than when funders and grantees are located in separate places.

Pegasus Park has been an exciting project. We are witnessing collaboration and trust between grantors and grantees and between many nonprofits that are working together for the first time. Each day, you can ride the elevator with someone and learn so much about them. If you need to work together, you work together faster and think more effectively.

Family Tradition

LC: The collaboration piece rings true to the biotech side of the campus as well. Could you talk about various biotech groups on campus and what it means for them to be co-located in this way?

MC: There are few places in Dallas and around the country where you will find public and private academic institutions of higher education come together on a third-party campus like Pegasus Park. UT Southwestern takes up five floors in the tower, including its Office of Technology Development, which helps bridge the for-profit and nonprofit emphasis on campus. It has been a signal to other universities to consider doing something similar.

Many conversations are happening across campus through collaborations between public universities that are part of the University of Texas System. The entrepreneurship group at UT Dallas works closely with UT Southwestern in a dual program that often meets at Pegasus Park. They identify biomedical engineering startups that share principal investigators across their campuses to form companies that advance health. UT Arlington is a huge resource for our region that sponsors a company each year to be part of BioLabs.

Southern Methodist University’s Institute for Computational Biosciences is a new presence on campus, just about to open, and we are excited to have them here to collaborate with their neighbors. Dallas College recently won a grant of almost $9 million from the U.S. Economic Development Administration, a federal program that helps regions around the country make better jobs accessible to underskilled workforces. The EDA supports Dallas College, Collin College, and Tarrant County College through a partnership with industry to provide better biotech, bioinformatics, and biomanufacturing jobs that will pay more than $15 an hour in regions that previously did not have training programs.

LC: Describe what is happening in the region more broadly.

NS: They always say, without your health, you basically have nothing, right? In Texas, and particularly in North Texas, we have one of the most diverse growing populations in the country. We must address health equity and make sure we are bringing the best technologies to market. We are sitting at the precipice of a major decade of discovery, and there will be much innovation happening in the clinical trials and the artificial intelligence spaces. Given that we have UT Dallas, UT Southwestern, Texas Instruments, AT&T, McKesson, and all these amazing companies here, we are right on the edge of innovation in life sciences in North Texas.

LC: We have had many exciting updates in our ecosystem over the past few years. If you had to name the biggest success story, what would it be?

NS: The obvious success story is the designation of Pegasus Park as the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) Customer Experience Hub. The U.S. government launched this federal agency for health a few years ago and made it available across the country, where dozens of cities competed for one of two outposts outside the Washington, D.C. area. Here in Texas, we have a diverse population of people in need of health care improvement so we partnered with great institutions across the state to showcase our innovative science to the government and the world. We were excited to collaborate with others to bring ARPA-H’s headquarters to Pegasus Park. They will fund the most innovative, creative, cutting edge technologies that will rapidly translate into health improvements. We have already seen the kinds of people they are bringing to our community, including top thought leaders who are working on some of the most important health challenges today.

LC: What do you envision for the short- and long-term future of Pegasus Park?

NS: We are months away from opening Bridge Labs*, which is 135,000 square feet of next-generation lab space. We undertook that project earlier than planned because BioLabs filled up quickly with growing companies needing new space, and there were few commercially rentable lab spaces available in our community. We hope to attract additional national tenants to our space in the next three years and are talking to more venture capitalist firms that are interested in relocating people and doing business here in North Texas.

Long-term, we hope Pegasus Park continues to be an exciting place for discovery and translational science and is a catalyst to the region. We know of a few companies that relocated to Texas, and we are excited that those conversations began right here at Pegasus Park.

MC: We will continue to see incredible basic science and translational science discoveries at the universities, which will underpin and supercharge what we can do in the region. The diverse population of North Texas, along with its incredible health systems, will provide a representative population for clinical trials. The eyes are already on Texas for innovative clinical trials, where we can advance as a region in creating the best devices and therapeutics to help people live their best lives.


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