Scientists at Orlando’s Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute have come up with an unusual new model for studying the way muscles work and how that relates to obesity: a couch-potato mouse.

In a new study being released today in the journal Cell Metabolism, Dr. Daniel Kelly and a team of colleagues at Sanford-Burnham’s Lake Nona campus created laboratory mice with very low levels of a protein called PGC-1 in their muscles.

Kelly and his team were surprised to find that the mice they engineered with the low protein levels were not obese or overweight. Instead, they looked normal and walked around without problems.

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Photo: Courtesy of the UCF College of Medicine

Just off State Road 417, a five-minute drive east from Orlando International Airport, a 650-acre parcel of land is fast becoming a $2 billion medical campus, including a medical school, research laboratories and hospitals.

Three years ago the Lake Nona medical city, as it is known, was nothing but a pasture and a promise. Its accelerated creation is the product of hundreds of millions of dollars in government, nonprofit and private investment at a time when Florida’s housing-based economy has been spiraling downward.

“We are working at warp speed here,” said Dr. Deborah C. German, the dean of the College of Medicine at the University of Central Florida, which opened on the Lake Nona campus last month. “Three and a half years ago, the architects weren’t even chosen. Now it’s fully operational.”

The history of this “city” began with a missed opportunity. In 2003, Jeb Bush, the governor at the time, announced plans to court large biomedical companies with government incentives, in an effort to attract higher-paying jobs to Florida. The Scripps Research Institute, based in the La Jolla area of San Diego, accepted $579 million in grants to open a location in Florida.

Orlando business leaders argued that the city would be an ideal place for the Scripps research park, especially the area around Lake Nona, in the relatively undeveloped southeastern quadrant of the city. Except for the Lake Nona Golf and Country Club, a gated community with a golf course by the noted designer Tom Fazio, most of the land sat empty, dotted with a smattering of cows left there for tax reasons (agricultural land in Florida is taxed minimally).

The Tavistock Group, which owns the country club and much of the empty land, set aside about 650 acres for a planned medical city, complete with retail stores and housing. “It’s close to the airport and it has good weather,” Dr. German said. “And there are resorts for kids.”

Orlando was already a major draw for doctors. It was named the country’s top destination for medical meetings by the Healthcare Convention and Exhibitors Association for 13 years straight until 2009, when it fell to second behind San Diego. “Orlando is a destination for relatively half the medical meetings in the U.S.,” said Eric Ushkowitz, director of BioOrlando, a unit of the Metro Orlando Economic Development Commission.

But Orlando lost the Scripps deal to Jupiter, Fla., a decision it said was due in part to its lack of a medical school, a crucial breeding ground for scientists and the core of any medical campus. So three years later, when the Burnham Institute for Medical Research agreed to build in Florida in exchange for a $310 million incentive package, Orlando’s chances improved when the University of Central Florida agreed to build its medical school at Lake Nona.

The Tavistock Group donated a portion of the 650-acre parcel for the institution to build on, and enough money was raised from the local community to pay tuition and living expenses for all 41 members of the charter class. That financing put the medical school on the map.

The medical school should be appealing to future classes for other reasons. The library, for example, has beautiful views and a notable absence of books. Students are instead given Apple iPods with access to online databases.

As soon as the medical school was approved in 2006, the Burnham Institute (now called the Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute after a recent $50 million donation by the billionaire T. Denny Sanford) chose Lake Nona for its new home. The building, which opened last year, contains one of the country’s few robotic high-throughput screening centers — machines that can run a huge number of biological tests very quickly.

Even so, $310 million was a large amount of government spending for just 300 well-paying scientist jobs. Adding up all the life-sciences incentives that Florida doled out, the total far exceeded a billion dollars. When the economy faltered, those incentives all but dried up. If the Sanford-Burnham Institute and the College of Medicine could not attract further development, the incentive money would not have been justified.

“We can’t spend another billion dollars to recruit research institutes,” Mr. Ushkowitz said.

So far the gamble has paid off. The announcements of the medical school and research institute began the hoped-for clustering effect, in which a variety of medical institutions scooped up neighboring plots to foster collaboration.

The M.D. Anderson Cancer Center Orlando rented lab space at one of the medical school buildings. A Veterans Affairs hospital is being built, along with a V.A. medical simulation training center. The University of Florida will open a research laboratory, and four incubator buildings for start-up biotech companies are in planning stages.

Also, Nemours, a children’s health care provider with a hospital in Wilmington, Del., and clinics in Florida, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, had bought land for a hospital elsewhere in Orlando in 2006 before it heard about the medical city. Those plans were scrapped and in 2009 the hospital broke ground at Lake Nona. The hospital, which plans to make use of Orlando’s warm weather with rooftop healing gardens, will open in 2012. Ronald McDonald House Charities is also considering opening a facility on hospital grounds.

“A lot of Sanford-Burnham researchers have similar interests with ours,” said Roger Oxendale, the chief executive of Nemours. “A lot of the questions they’ll be asking about diabetes and obesity, they’ll be asking with respect to childhood diseases. I think we haven’t realized the potential of these partnerships.”

Source: New York Times, Sept. 7, 2010, Orlando’s Newest Attraction is Medical, by Jonathan Vatner.

A version of this article appeared in print on Sept. 8, 2010, on page B5 of the New York edition.

This impressive site includes Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute, the University of Central Florida medical school and Burnett School of Biomedical Sciences, M.D. Anderson Cancer Center Orlando’s Cancer Research Institute, Nemours Children’s Hospital and the Orlando Veterans Affairs Medical Center. Soon it will include the University of Florida, the first major UF facility to be built outside of Gainesville.

Amid all this construction and at the heart of Orlando’s emerging biotech cluster and the economic development it promises is science. To translate the science into advanced clinical care will require the state-of-the-art facilities that are now being built, and the world-class researchers who are pioneering this new venture.

I suggest that there are three additional ingredients necessary for life sciences to flourish in Orlando: The accomplishments of the region must be recognized by peers within the national scientific community; a young, talented work force needs to be recruited; and we must create collaborative opportunities with commercial and nonprofit partners.

This month, Sanford- Burnham Institute hosted a milestone event that jump-started these crucial initiatives by linking Orlando to medical-research powerhouses across the U.S. The institute set the stage for the medical city’s national debut by hosting its inaugural scientific symposium featuring top-tier speakers and 250 scientists from across the U.S.

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When private and local funding is included, the eight biotechnology projects have received a total of $1.55 billion so far. That equates to $1.4 million in taxpayer expense per job created.

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From the article – “Industry: Health care is supposed to be recession-proof in terms of jobs, and perhaps there’s some truth to that. But when Orlando talks health care, it focuses largely on the development angle. And that is not shielded from the economy. Just last week we saw Lake Nona, developer of southeast Orlando’s “medical city,” lay off some staff. While public financing saw to it that the Burnham Institute for Medical Research opened its doors last year, to be followed this year by UCF’s medical school, commercial development has been slow to take shape there. Medical city, as Lake Nona owner Tavistock Group has always said, is a long-term proposition. But if 2010 continues to bring little action, then it will be even longer term than we first thought.”

It’s a good read, so make sure you take a few minutes to read the rest of the post.

That old adage about caloric overindulgence doesn’t just apply to noticeably visible parts of the body.

Scientists at the Burnham Institute for Medical Research at Lake Nona are looking at ways fat is deposited in and around the heart to find new ways to treat diabetes and its heart-related complications.

In a lecture Wednesday, Burnham’s scientific director Daniel P. Kelly explained how the body processes fat overload, and how his lab is working to find new treatments for heart disease associated with too much fat.

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Dr. Daniel P. Kelly, scientific director of the Burnham Institute for Medical Research at Lake Nona was awarded the American Heart Association’s 2009 Basic Research Prize on Nov. 15.

The prize, awarded at the group’s Scientific Session in Orlando, recognizes Kelly as an international authority on the molecular biology and physiology of cardiac metabolism and as a physician-scientist who projects a vision of how research can translate into beneficial treatments.

In presenting the award, Dr. Clyde W. Yancy, president of the AHA said: “Dr. Kelly is a genuinely gifted scientist and he is showing, brilliantly, how basic research can move seamlessly from the bench to the bedside, to the enormous benefit of all.”

Kelly’s pioneering work in fuel and energy metabolism is defining new classes of drug targets and sets the stage for more personalized therapies. Kelly is leading the development of research programs at Burnham’s Diabetes and Obesity Research Center, located at the newly dedicated east-coast campus in Lake Nona.

Florida Hospital East Orlando opened its first outpatient surgery center to patients on Nov. 23.

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You’re planning to move, and you’re sure you’ve thought of everything: a good school system, affordable property taxes, a manageable commute. But what about your health? It turns out that where you live may have an impact on your risk of obesity and diabetes.

A study published this month in Archives of Internal Medicine found that living in a healthy neighborhood—defined as one that encourages you to ditch the car keys, get moving, and eat more healthfully—may lower the risk of developing type 2 diabetes by 38 percent. Previous research has found that living somewhere with these qualities may lower the risk of obesity. “Some neighborhoods encourage people to make healthful choices by providing the amenities and opportunities for those choices,” says Jennifer Black, lead author of a review about neighborhoods and obesity published last year in Nutrition Reviews. Other neighborhoods have barriers to physical activity and to making healthful dietary choices, such as high crime rates or no (or limited) access to shopping or services within walking distance, she says. So find a place where you “feel safe to live, move, walk, work, shop, and eat,” as well as participate in community activities that meet your social needs, Black says. Here are some specific things to look for to make your next neighborhood a healthy one:

Walkability of the neighborhood, including sidewalks. Some new neighborhoods that encourage physical activity are built so that residents can walk to obtain nearly all of the services they need—dry cleaning, restaurants, hair salons, barber shops, gyms, and more. But it’s harder to re-engineer an existing neighborhood to include these services, so this kind of place may be tough to find, says Steven Smith, executive director of the Translational Research Institute at the Florida Hospital and Burnham Institute for Medical Research at Lake Nona in Orlando. Even if you have to get in the car for your errands, though, look out for sidewalks so you can at least move within your neighborhood.

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Postdoctoral associate Zhenji Gan (left) works recently with scientific director Dr. Daniel Kelly at Orlando's Burnham Institute for Medical Research at Lake Nona. (JOE BURBANK, ORLANDO SENTINEL / October 8, 2009)

When the Burnham Institute for Medical Research celebrates its official dedication today with the first building to open at Lake Nona’s emerging medical city, there will be plenty of speeches and tours highlighting its robotics, laser microscope system and other cutting-edge technology in the $85 million facility.

But the brains behind Burnham are the real stars of the show.

Dr. Daniel Kelly, an internationally recognized cardiovascular researcher and scientific director of the Lake Nona institute, is charged with assembling an all-star team of pioneering researchers working to reveal the fundamental causes of today’s diseases and come up with the cures and therapies of tomorrow.

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It is a fitting image for an institution that has served as a beacon in the development of Orlando’s life-sciences hub.

When Burnham is officially dedicated Thursday — more than five months after scientists started moving in — it will be the first building to open at the emerging “medical city” at Lake Nona in southeast Orange County.

“It’s an exciting milestone for us,” said Burnham President and CEO John Reed. “The thing I’m most proud of is that it’s everything we said we would do — on time, on plan, on budget. I’m looking forward to a fun celebration, and to catching our breath for a second to pause and reflect on what we’ve accomplished and what lies ahead.”

The grand opening of Burnham’s $85million building — which took a few more months to build than original estimates and came in slightly over budget — represents a major step in raising Central Florida’s profile as an emerging biotech hub.

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