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Featured: CPRIT awards $22 million to Houston institutions, new smart AI technology and more

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Editor’s note:Let’s round up the most read Houston innovation news of the week. Houston’s trending tech and startup stories from InnovationMap and its daily newsletter included new funding from CPRIT, a health tech startup’s Series A, and more.

Houston healthcare facilities receive $22 million to attract top recruits

The grants, worth between $2 million and $6 million each, are intended to recruit distinguished researchers. Photo via Getty Images

Baylor College of Medicine in Houston has received a total of $12 million in grants from the Cancer Prevention & Research Institute of Texas to attract two distinguished researchers.

The two grants, worth $6 million each, are intended for the recruitment of Thomas Milner and Radek Skoda. The Cancer Prevention & Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT) announced the grants on May 14. Continue reading.

Houston startup gets $10 million to expand into rural communities

Dr. Toby Hamilton got $10 million to expand his business. Photo via tmc.edu

A Houston company working on a value-based primary care model has new funding to support its mission.

Hamilton Health Box announced the completion of a $10 million Series A funding round led by 1588 Ventures with participation from Memorial Hermann Health System, Johnson & Johnson Foundation’s Impact Ventures, Texas Medical Center Venture Fund and the Sullivan Brothers.

Founded in 2019 by Dr. Toby R. Hamilton, the company will use the funding to fuel its expansion into rural areas to help people living in Health Professional Shortage Areas, or HPSAs. Continue reading.

Houston researchers create AI model to exploit link between brain activity and disease

BrainLM is now well trained enough to be able to refine a specific task and pose questions in further studies. Photo via Getty Images

Houston researchers are part of a team that created an AI model intended to understand the link between brain activity and behavior and disease.

Scientists at Baylor College of Medicine worked with peers at Yale University, the University of Southern California and Idaho State University to create a brain language model, or BrainLM. Their research was published as a conference paper at ICLR 2024, a gathering of some of the greatest minds in deep learning.

“We have known for a long time that brain activity is linked to a person’s behavior and to many diseases like seizures or Parkinson’s disease,” Dr. Chadi Abdallah, associate professor in the Menninger Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Baylor and co. -the corresponding author of the article, says. Continue reading.

Houston family’s $20 million donation boosts neurodegeneration research

The Belfer family, led by oil tycoon Robert Belfer, had donated an additional $20 million to the Belfer Consortium on Neurodegeneration. Photo via mdanderson.org

Neurodegeneration is one of the cruelest ways to age, but a Houston family is sharing their wealth to reinvigorate research with the goal of eradicating diseases like Alzheimer’s.

This month, Laurence Belfer announced that her family, led by oil tycoon Robert Belfer, had donated an additional $20 million to the Belfer Consortium for Neurodegeneration, a multi-institutional initiative that targets the study and treatment of Alzheimer’s disease.

This latest sum brings the family’s donations to the BNDC to $53.5 million over a little over a decade. The Belfer family’s recent donation will be supplemented by institutional philanthropic efforts, meaning the NBDC will actually be $40 million richer. Continue reading.

Booming suburbs of Houston and other Texas cities among fastest-growing U.S. cities in 2023

Here’s how Texas cities stack up in a new population report. Photo via Getty Images

A Houston suburb experienced one of the nation’s fastest growth spurts last year: Complete shear, whose population grew by 25.6 percent, more than 51 times the national growth rate of 0.5 percent. The city’s population was 42,616 as of July 1, 2023.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2023 population estimates, released Thursday, May 16, Fulshear — which is west of Katy in northwest Fort Bend County — ranks second on the list of cities to the fastest growing with a population of 20,000 or more. It’s no wonder that iconic Houston restaurants like Molina’s Cantina see opportunities.

The South still dominates the nation’s growth, although cities in the U.S. Northeast and Midwest are rebounding slightly after years of population decline. Census estimates showed that 13 of the 15 fastest-growing U.S. cities were in the South, including eight in Texas alone. Continue reading.

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