Fifty years ago, a visionary group of medical leaders realized the need for local healthcare to evolve.
A regional blood supplier and local hospitals were simply unable to meet the community’s needs. The solution was a community-based blood center, a single centralized organization for collection, processing and distribution to our region.
The result of their vision was the South Texas Regional Blood Bank, which five decades later has evolved into BioBridge Global and its family of nonprofits – South Texas Blood & Tissue, QualTex Laboratories, GenCure and The Blood & Tissue Center Foundation.
Collecting, processing and delivering blood donations is still a big part of the focus. But in the last 20 years, the organization has evolved, adding programs to collect cord blood and birth tissue donations from new mothers, as well as helping posthumous donors give the gift of life through tissue donations. Millions of blood and plasma donations are tested for infectious diseases annually.
And that evolution continues, as BioBridge Global and its subsidiaries today are supporting the development of new advanced therapies to address a wide range of conditions.
South Texas Blood & Tissue is teaming with developers of new medical therapies and devices to support research and improve healthcare for everyone.
At the VelocityTX biotech incubator on the East Side, the GenCure process development laboratory and clean room facility are part of the city’s robust biomedical industry. GenCure is working with scientists to take concepts for new cures from lab scale to clinical trial scale and beyond.
Because of its history with biologic testing in QualTex Laboratories, in-house support is available for required testing of breakthrough cellular therapies.
The research and development team within BioBridge Global has filed multiple patent applications recently, from an all-new method for testing the effectiveness of cellular therapies to ways to make sure donated cells do not go to waste.
While BioBridge Global will continue to grow and evolve over the next 50 years, one thing is certain – it will continue to help advance the future of medicine.
Learn more about our five decades of service to South Texas on our website. You can be a part of the next 50 years of saving lives, too – visit SouthTexasBlood.org to find out about the many ways you can take part, as well as schedule a blood donation.
