Dallas County Plans $52M Bio Lab Development Near Southwestern Medical District

Dallas County is joining North Texas’ biotech boom with a 1.6-acre purchase on the north end of the Southwestern Medical District, where the county will develop a $52 million, 75,000 square-foot bio lab and life science building. It will be the new location of the Dallas County Health and Human Services Public Health Laboratory (PHL), which will be used to study infectious agents.

The facility will seek to be a Bio-Safety Level 3 laboratory certified to study potentially lethal infectious agents or toxins transmitted through the air. ” The core diagnostic functions are, along with safety, related to identification, containment, security, and incident response to emerging and high consequence diseases,” the court order reads.