A new home

A new era of research and discoveries in aging began in October when UT Health San Antonio broke ground on a new and expanded Sam & Ann Barshop Institute for Longevity & Aging Studies.

The three-story, 108,000-square-foot building will be located at the corner of Floyd Curl and Charles Katz drives, adjacent to UT Health San Antonio’s Medical Arts & Research Center and across the street from the university’s Greehey Academic & Research Campus.

The first floor of the new building will include open research labs, laboratory support, administrative and research faculty offices, and a large vivarium with support spaces and cage wash facilities. The second and third floors will accommodate future research labs and faculty offices.
An open-air bridge will cross over Floyd Curl and connect the Barshop to the South Texas Research Facility. The total project will cost $70.2 million.

This vision of a world-class center for aging research first came into focus in 1991, when Edward J. Masoro, Ph.D., founded the university’s Aging Research and Education Center through a leadership award granted to him by the National Institutes of Health.

In 2001, the Barshop Institute for Longevity & Aging Studies was created through a donation from San Antonio philanthropists Sam and Ann Barshop. It was located at the Texas Research Park on Lambda Drive in southwest San Antonio.

Since that time, the Barshop has grown into one of the world’s premier aging research centers and is now the only aging-intensive research institute in the country to have two NIA-funded centers (Nathan Shock and Claude D. Pepper), a testing site of the NIA-sponsored Interventions Testing Program, and a U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Geriatric Research, Education and Clinical Center.

Construction on the new building is expected to be complete by late 2019.