How Oklahoma’s biotech innovation is diversifying the state’s economy
“Things are incredible during the boom times,” said Joyce Burch, director of corporate partnerships and regional economic development at the University of Oklahoma (OU). “Everyone’s working, making a ton of money, spending a lot of money.”
Oil and gas have tied the fortunes of many Oklahomans and have forged the identity of a state otherwise known by outsiders for big college football games and big tornadoes. But prosperity built on a fluctuating market can be fragile, and the inevitable dry spells paint an ugly picture when prices shift unfavorably. “We can’t continue to go up and down like this,” Burch said. “It’s too painful. And we are losing our kids. They’re moving to other places.”
To stifle the bleeding, the state has sought diversification. Oklahoma has invested in other industries such as aerospace, defense, and biotechnology. But according to Burch, the burgeoning biotech sector struggled to establish an early foothold.
That changed for the better in 2022.
That year, the US Economic Development Administration awarded the Oklahoma Biotech Innovation Cluster $35 million from the Build Back Better Regional Challenge. The money was divided among six grants, with four of those benefiting the OU.
That funding helped to build the OU’s Bioprocessing Core Facility (BPCF), which the university started so it could teach biomanufacturing skills to students through a mix of theory and hands-on training.
The Innovation Cluster’s BioTC Oklahoma also works in talent development, providing short, intensive courses to people who may have never considered working in biomanufacturing.
Jeff Seymour, president of the Oklahoma City Innovation District, said that BioTC strives to familiarize people with technology, introducing them to applications and vernacular that was once unthinkable to them. Such trainings enable folks from non-science backgrounds to enter the field, starting with a one-week, heavily guided program.
“One of the guys was a barista,” Seymour said when discussing his class of recruits. “One girl was slowly trickling through undergrad.” He said that if not for the basic training provided by the program, such folks could have been overwhelmed by the industry and the dense nomenclature regularly used to describe its tools and processes.
Through a partnership with Wheeler Bio in Oklahoma City, students can move from the program into a manufacturing job and then choose how to pursue their long-term careers, whether that’s moving into a graduate program or settling into a manufacturing position.
Jeff Volz, associate dean for partnerships in the College of Engineering at OU, said such jobs can provide perfect opportunities for people who appreciate the hands-on approach more than they do the science. “[Some people are] good with their hands. They’re good at making things, and they’re not necessarily wanting to know all the deep background theory. They want to make stuff.” He said such workers can find great careers in processing facilities.
But Volz himself is no stranger to academic leadership through his work in the bioprocess facility funded by the EDA grant. His team supports workforce development while offering undergraduate and graduate bioprocessing certificates, also working with local companies to place workers. “The great part is [that students] get their hands-on state-of-the-art equipment that they will be overseeing and supervising,” he said.
“We have bioreactors from 250 milliliters up to 25 liters,” he said. Those tools and others enable students to work at a small scale and familiarize themselves with the process of growing bacteria and mammalian cells before purifying and testing them.
Such programs seek to bolster the state’s foothold in life sciences from the ground up, supporting a backbone that has been built by third-party manufacturers and leading cancer researchers such as those working at the Stephenson Cancer Center. According to Volz, the Stephenson Cancer Center is engaged in 400 clinical trials as of June 2025 while being a top institute for the study and treatment of pancreatic cancer.
To Seymour, the potential of biotechnology in Oklahoma transcends the state itself. “If you really look at the demographics of the United States and where growth is continuing to occur,” he said, “it really looks like the population of Oklahoma City.”
He sees the city as a test bed that can inform researchers on how to serve diverse populations in the entire country when developing and testing life-changing therapies.
“How are we going to serve those populations?” he asked. “And how are we going to think about the technology and the pharmaceuticals that are going to be needed?”
If he’s right, some of the toughest questions in life science won’t be answered by a big biotech hub. They’ll be answered in a little state tucked between Texas and Kansas once known for oil and gas.
