A Healthy Start

Medical City is taking shape on the board-flat farmland south of Orlando International Airport, its first crop of gleaming research and training buildings already sparkling in the hot summer sun like newly cut jewels.

Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute, one of the world’s most highly regarded biotechnology laboratories, opened a giant research center there in late 2009 while the University of Central Florida’s much anticipated College of Medicine debuted in 2010 with its first two classes of students.

The 600-acre Lake Nona complex, which will encompass medical and research installations projected to cost $1.5 billion, is poised to become Central Florida’s second most significant destination, just behind Walt Disney World.

Like the region’s world-renowned theme parks, this burgeoning life sciences cluster will draw people from around the globe. And if boosters are right, it will one day join the Mayo and Cleveland clinics in the nation’s pantheon of top-tier treatment centers.

Between now and that day, a vast amount of work must be completed. Yet even as cranes and bulldozers continue to reshape the landscape, the complex has begun to function.

Sanford-Burnham already has 160 employees at Lake Nona, including 110 research scientists. In its M.D. program, the UCF medical school will enroll 80 new students in 2011, 100 students in 2012 and 120 in 2013 and beyond. The college’s Burnett School of Biomedical Sciences is already home to more than 2,500 undergraduate, master’s and doctoral students.

Work is well under way on two hospitals and a research center that will round out the complex. The Nemours Children’s Hospital is now under construction while the Orlando Veterans Affairs Medical Center is expected to be finished by 2012. In addition, a University of Florida academic and research center will house a comprehensive Drug Development Center, the UF College of Pharmacy Doctoral Program and biomedical research laboratories.

The ultimate result: a vibrant new Central Florida research center employing more than 30,000 people with an $8 billion economic impact. In fact, experts say, Medical City is the most important local project since 1967, when Walt Disney unveiled his grandiose vision and set the stage for the region’s emergence as the tourism capital of the world.

Sanford-Burnham chose the Lake Nona area following an extensive search for a third campus on the East Coast. The non-profit organization, with headquarters in La Jolla, Calif., and satellite operations in Santa Barbara, will concentrate on diabetes and obesity research in its $85 million, 178,000-square-foot facility.

“The general feeling is that we have already exceeded our expectations,” says Dr. Stephen Gardell, the Orlando center’s director of translation research resources. “We’ve been able to attract world-class scientists and our recruiting is ahead of schedule.” In its first year of operations at Lake Nona, Sanford-Burnham attracted $40 million in research grants.

When Medical City’s initial phase is complete, its mixture of research, teaching and treatment centers will offer something that even more established biomedical hubs lack: an integrated array of institutions poised to work cooperatively to tackle medical challenges, train doctors and nurses and treat patients with a wide variety of health problems.

“There’s a lot of room for collaboration and synergy when you have so many institutions so close to one another,” says Dr. Clarence Brown, president of the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center Orlando. “It’s very exciting.”
M.D. Anderson relocated from downtown Orlando to Lake Nona, where it occupies the top floor of UCF’s facility. Brown expects his staff of 25, which includes 10 researchers with doctoral degrees, will work closely with other institutions as they tackle cancer research.

“Sanford-Burnham’s focus is obesity and diabetes, but there’s a real link between those conditions and cancer,” Brown adds. “We’re also very excited about the University of Florida coming here because of its interest in cancer research.”

UF broke ground in the fall of 2010 on a $40 million, 100,000-square-foot research and conference center in Lake Nona. The university wants to develop partnerships with other key players in the Medical City project, adding its formidable resources to the mix. In 2009, the Gainesville institution received $678 million in research grants, half of it for biomedical programs.

In addition to housing research activity and the doctoral program in pharmacy, the UF center will be the site of a five-year study on mobility in the elderly. Occupancy is slated for late 2011.

“Our university is very receptive to creating programs outside of Gainesville,” UF spokesman Joseph Kays says. “We believe the players involved at Lake Nona are capable of making this a major research center, and I’m sure the folks are hopeful there will be many spinoffs from the work they do.”

Though significant offshoots could take years to come to fruition, backers of Medical City say they could have huge implications for future economic growth. They point to Central Florida’s well-established simulation and photonics clusters as examples.

UCF has aided growth in the simulation and photonics industries with its technology incubator program. The incubator, which started with a single center in east Orange County’s Central Florida Research Park, has opened satellites across the region. A new unit at Lake Nona is now being discussed.

UCF is also contributing to Lake Nona’s research component through its Burnett School and College of Medicine. Initially, Burnett will be home to 12 researchers and 50 students focusing on cancer, infectious diseases, neurodegenerative diseases and cardiovascular disease.

The five-story Burnett school opened at Lake Nona in 2009, and the medical school followed in an adjacent $65 million building this year. UCF spokeswoman Wendy Spirduso Sarubbi said both Burnett and the medical school will benefit from cutting-edge technology.

“It’s different from the way medical students were trained a generation ago,” Sarubbi notes. “The medical library will be 98 percent digital. The cadaver lab will use touchscreens to give students more information about what they’re seeing.”

Research may be the key to Lake Nona’s future as an economic growth center, but its treatment centers and hospitals offer a more immediate contribution. Within the next four years, the Orlando Veterans Administration Medical Center and Nemours Children’s Hospital will open with a combined workforce of nearly 3,000 medical, administrative and support workers.

The VA hospital, scheduled to open in late 2012, will be the size of a shopping mall, with 1.2 million square feet. The decision to build the hospital in Lake Nona reflects Central Florida’s huge population growth during the past several decades. It will offer 314 hospital beds, including 22-intensive care beds and a 40-bed mental health unit.

“Medical City was a very big driver for this hospital,” says Courtney Franchio, the VA center’s spokeswoman. “One of our missions is education and research, so to co-locate with these facilities is ideal.”

The VA hospital, with 2,100 employees, will provide inpatient and outpatient treatment to veterans living primarily in Orange, Lake, Seminole, Osceola, Brevard and Volusia counties.

Nemours Children’s Hospital will be Lake Nona’s second major treatment center. Now under construction, the 95-bed hospital will encompass 630,000 square feet on a 60-acre campus. It’s expected to open in mid-2012 and employ about 800.

“Nemours considers itself the Mayo Clinic for kids,” hospital spokesman Jarrod Cady says. “I believe our hospital, paired with the rest of the Medical City, will be a destination for people from around the world.”

This will be Delaware-based Nemours’ first major hospital in the South. It operates clinics in Orlando, Jacksonville and Pensacola, but the hospital will offer far more services than any of its other Florida operations.

“We’ll address the needs of the whole family,” Cady notes. “We’ll have a clinical concierge who’ll coordinate a variety of family services. A lot of times families coping with a child’s medical problems are left to their own devices to figure things out.”

Central Florida is taking a big gamble on Medical City. It lured Sanford-Burnham with more than $70 million in subsidies and exponents of the project worked tirelessly convincing Nemours, the VA and the universities to sign on.

As impressive as the first phase of the Medical City campus appears, Lake Nona’s developer, Tavistock Group, says it’s just the beginning. It anticipates Valencia Community College will eventually have a campus there and UCF is considering expansion, including possibly moving its nursing school to the complex.

“By 2017, the cluster is expected to generate 30,000 jobs and $2.8 billion in wages and add $7.6 billion in economic activity,” Sarubbi notes.

Central Florida’s tourism image might even benefit the region’s emergence as a medical destination. Many families with a member needing medical attention will likely visit local attractions during their stay.

But the big boast could come from the untold number of other medical and pharmaceutical businesses that might establish Orlando-area offices in order to work with Lake Nona’s core institutions. The project’s proponents point to Southern California, where a large health-care sector developed after Sanford-Burnham opened in 1960.

Still, no one can say how long it might take for a significant number of satellite businesses to emerge. The impact of vastly more sophisticated telecommunications might weigh against a repeat of what happened at the original Sanford-Burnham, as researchers opt to communicate electronically instead of face to face. And the growth in the biotech and biomedical sectors might not fulfill high expectations.

But Tavistock is confident Medical City will be a success. “The project will take decades, and it will ultimately have 20,000 people living on the site,” says Tavistock spokesman Rob Adams.

The company has set aside land for rail lines and is configuring much of the commercial and residential development in anticipation of the day when more people walk and use mass transit.

Medical City’s pioneering institutions say that attracting the talent hasn’t been difficult so far. And they say it should become even easier as the complex expands and opportunities for two-career couples grow.

As Sanford-Burnham’s Gardell surveys the construction near his institute’s new building, he glimpses a future rich in opportunity.

“What is coming here is a catalyst to spark the local economy,” Gardell says. “Things are in place, and the opportunities are certain to present themselves.”