CEO nabs honor for global impact
Dr. Larry Schlesinger says he no longer feels like the “new guy” in town.
The infectious disease doctor will soon be joining the ranks of other local honorees including Brigadier Gen. Robert Mcdermott who led USAA, Tom Frost of Frost Bank, Charles Butt of H-E-B, “Red” Mccombs who built a car dealership empire, former homebuilder Gordon Hartman and former San Antonio mayors Henry Cisneros and Phil Hardberger.
Schlesinger, president and CEO of Texas Biomedical Research Institute, has been named the 2021 International Citizen of the Year by the World Affairs Council of San Antonio. He will be honored 7 p.m. Wednesday during a virtual celebration — a first for the local council that formed in 1982.
“This is our 36th year and we always honor someone who is doing work locally that is making some sort of global impact, and we cannot think of anyone better, particularly with what is happening around the world now,” said Armen Babajanian, the council’s executive director. “We’re recognizing all that he and his colleagues have done this past year.”
Since Schlesinger took the helm in 2017, Texas Biomed has gotten twice as many grants and contracts and raised more than $30 million. It recruited 13 faculty members and started a 10-year plan that led to more than $40 million in construction projects across the 200-acre campus that is home to a biosafety level 4 laboratory.
These early investments allowed the institute to be prepared when Pfizer and Biontech needed safety and efficacy testing for the first COVID-19 vaccine approved for emergency use by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
Texas Biomed’s labs have been used to test vaccine and other medical treatments to ensure they are safe to progress to human clinical studies. It has also conducted preclinical studies for biotech company Novavax for what could
be the fourth COVID-19 vaccine.
Schlesinger says the pandemic has highlighted the fact that we're a global society and viruses “know no borders.”
“The past year has been extraordinary in so many ways, and I strongly believe science will be the true hero of this historic time,” he said. “I am humbled to have been at Texas Biomed surrounded by scientists, as we all work to eradicate this plague, and I am grateful for the opportunity to lead this organization during this time.”
Aside from running the nonprofit research institute, Schlesinger's work on tuberculosis has been funded for more than 30 years by the National Institutes of Health and others including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
He said having a COVID-19 vaccine in arms within 11 months is a tremendous feat and one that, when asked at the beginning of the pandemic, he wasn't sure would happen.
“We had a huge advantage just knowing what the culprit was,” he said. “Back in 2003 when SARS traveled around the world, we didn't even know it was a virus.”
But science and genomics has advanced since then and knowing it was a coronavirus, scientists were able to identify the genetic code of SARS-COV-2 within a week or two. There are numerous coronaviruses; SARS-COV-2 is the one causing this pandemic. Other scientists had been working on vaccine platforms and were able to adapt their work to focus on the quickly spreading coronavirus variant.
At Texas Biomed, they decided early on that validated animal models would be essential to moving any vaccine or therapy to market. Last summer, vaccine developer Pfizer sent its vaccine to San Antonio to find out whether it was protective.
“They certainly were. They performed beautifully in the animal models,” Schlesinger said.
“So everything aligned properly, everyone leaned in and it was a worldwide effort of just executing,” he said. “We were still reacting to a crisis, and I'd argue that in the future we need to be better prepared than we were for this one.”
Tickets for the event honoring Schlesinger start at $100 and are available at wacofsa.org.