Houston is a beautiful city, and it is probably better known to the Chinese people because of NASA and Yao Ming of the Houston rockets. Houston is also very famous for its Texas Medical Center (TMC).

    The Texas Medical Center is the world’s largest Medical Center and it contains 54 medicine-related institutions, with twenty-one hospitals and eight specialty institutions, eight academic and research institutions, four medical schools, seven nursing schools, three public health organizations, two pharmacy schools and a dental school. All 54 institutions are non-profit.

    The Texas Medical Center houses the world’s largest children’s hospital (Texas Children’s Hospital), as well as the world’s largest cancer hospital (MD Anderson Cancer Center). The Center receives an average of 3,300 patient visits a day, and over eight million annual patient visits, including over 18,000 international patients. The TMC has over 750,000 ER visitors each year. Now the center employed over 110,000 people, including 20,000 physicians, scientists, researchers and other advanced degree professionals in the life sciences. The Texas Medical Center offered over 9,200 total patient beds, and has a gross domestic product of 25 billion dollars.

    In order to promote innovation and commercialization of Texas medical center, Texas medical center will invest 1.5 billion dollars to expand and build TMC3, the world’s first biological science center. Construction will be started in 2019 and completed in 2022. The “3” of TMC3 stands for Houston life sciences’ Third Coast. The 37-acre cooperative will be Shared by five founding institutions, in which TMC contributed $40 million and the other four contributed $36.45 million. It is believed then TMC3 will become the world’s first biotechnology and biological science innovation center.

By Liu Chang/ Lin Juanzhen

Edited by Office of International Cooperation and Communication