Source: Orlando Sentinel

The medical city sprouting in southeast Orlando is behind schedule. So what?

The delays mean that the University of Central Florida medical school, UCF’s Burnett School of Biomedical Sciences, the Burnham Institute for Medical Research and the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center of Orlando are about six months to a year off their originally anticipated openings.

If that’s the worst that can be said in a recession that has ravaged most business development, we should all let out a sigh of relief.

But before we exhale, there are some much larger challenges to consider for the emerging life sciences cluster in Lake Nona.

The development was imagined as the invention of a new piece of Orlando’s economy that would help insulate the region from the perils of relying on tourism, real estate and population growth that have made weathering this recession especially hard on Central Florida.

But biotechnology is like the new game on the playground of economic development. Everybody’s doing it. And a lot of other regions have done it a lot bigger and faster than we have — at least so far.

Read More: Delays aren’t medical city’s biggest challenge in Lake Nona