The Texas A&M System has won a huge federal contract to become one of the nation’s major hubs of vaccine production and bioterror preparedness.

Over an expected lifetime of 25 years the federal contract to create a Center for Innovation in Advanced Development and Manufacturing is likely worth $1.5 to $2 billion.

“It’s the biggest federal grant to come to Texas since NASA, quite frankly,” Texas A&M University System Chancellor John Sharp said.

The contract, announced today by U.S. Department of Health and Human Service Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, is remarkable for several reasons:

Politics: In an election year a university whose most famous graduate is Rick Perry, and which is the most conservative university in one of the reddest states, landed a major federal boon from a Democratic President.

Economics: During the next few years of construction the center will create about 1,000 jobs in the Bryan-College Station area. After the facilities are up and running many more well-paying jobs will come. There is also considerable promise for pharmaceutical companies to relocate to the Brazos Valley.

Engineering: Texas A&M has traditionally been known as an engineering and agricultural school. It has now successfully moved into the 21st century, an age of biology. With today’s announcement the university now becomes a major hub of bioengineering.

WHAT WILL IT DO?

So what will the center, one of three created today by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services do? There are four primary functions:

1. Provide a national response to a pandemic influenza outbreak: The centers are each tasked with providing 50 million doses to the government within four months of the identification of a strain. This would be about twice as fast as the vaccine making process during the 2009 outbreak of H1N1. The first doses must be available within 12 weeks. “Once it’s implemented, it really will solve the pandemic crisis,” said Dr. Brett Giroir, principle investigator of Texas A&M’s center.

2. Build the national countermeasure stockpile: The centers are tasked with developing advanced manufacturing techniques for all vaccine and medical countermeasures for chemical and biological threats, such as anthrax, antibody therapies, and treatments for radiation poisoning. The goal would be to speed up response to these kinds of incidents as well as pandemic influenza.

3. Accelerate the development of countermeasures: Bring together the expertise needed to expedite the movement of medical countermeasures to natural (i.e. Ebola virus) and manmade biological and chemical threats out of the lab and into the stockpile. This includes clinical trials. The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston and Baylor College of Medicine are important partners in this endeavor.

4. Workforce training: The centers must guarantee a capable U.S. workforce in this area because much of the industry is going offshore to China and other countries. “We can’t let the expertise fail in the United States,” Giroir said.

HOW DID IT HAPPEN?

Giroir, who came to Texas A&M in 2008 from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, deserves a lot of the credit.

Believing that the federal government was about to get serious about increasing its capacity to rapidly manufacture vaccines, Giroir urged the state of Texas to begin putting the pieces together for a successful bid.

He did so in large part by obtaining a $50 million grant from Gov. Rick Perry’s Texas Emerging Technology Fund, to build the National Center for Therapeutics Manufacturing, a large complex that provides educational opportunities for students, as well as modular space for developing, testing and manufacturing vaccines and other drugs. It opened last fall.

College Station may not be known for biotechnology, but the new facility fills a niche in the state economy, Giroir said.

Other state institutions, primarily affiliated with the University of Texas system, excel at basic research and clinical trials. In between, however, there is a scarcity of resources and space for taking lab breakthroughs, conducting animal tests and making large, quality-controlled batches of new medicines for clinical trials.

A&M’s veterinary school and engineering expertise will help ease and speed this “translational” phase of medicine development, Giroir said. The concept already has attracted interest, with UT’s M.D. Anderson Cancer Center reserving one-sixth of the drug manufacturing space in the NCTM for the next 10 years.

Giroir and Sharp also said they had critical support from state leaders.

“It begins with Governor Perry and his vision to establish Texas as the ‘third coast’ of the biopharmaceuticals industry,” Sharp said. “Over the past decade the State of Texas has methodically cultivated and grown the biopharma and technology industries in Texas, and the fruits of those labors are being born today.

WHY IS THIS NECESSARY?

It took about eight months to make the H1N1 vaccine after the initial swine flu outbreak in 2009, by which time tens of millions of Americans already had been infected and experienced mild symptoms.

“I don’t want to minimize this because thousands of people lose their lives, but it was a blessing because there could have been millions of lives lost,” Giroir told me last fall. “And it reinforced the need for our country to be prepared for this.”

The H1N1 outbreak prompted the federal government to speed up the vaccine-manufacturing process.

“We are launching a new initiative that will give us the capacity to respond faster and more effectively to bioterrorism or infectious disease,” President Barack Obama said in his 2010 State of the Union address.

That initiative led to a federal request for proposals to create two or three “Centers of Innovation in Advanced Development and Manufacturing.”

After a long process — Sharp characterized it as birthing a child — A&M got one of them, and has the only one led by an academic institution. The other two are led by Emergent BioSolutions and Novartis. This is a big step toward hardening our country against the threats of influenza and bioterrorism.