Shiny renderText: half italicized, half not?

In my shiny app, I have a textOutput named acronym where I would like to renderText some text which is half non-italicized, half-italicized.

I tried doing it like this:

output$acronym_1 <- renderText(paste("SID SIDE:", tags$em("Siderastrea siderea")))

But this did not get the second half in italics. How do I do this? Thanks in advance.