The Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute scored $300 million in 2006 when it agreed to set up shop in Central Florida, making it one of the largest beneficiaries of public incentive money in state history.

Just five years later, the institute that is central to Orlando’s “medical city” development – along with UCF’s medical school and two hospitals – appealed to lawmakers for even more money.

It succeeded last week in the final days of the Legislative session, winning $2 million in economic development funds.

It’s official: Sanford-Burnham is too big to fail. We have to keep pumping money into it or risk putting a strain on one of the key anchors of Florida’s hopes for a thriving biomedical industry.

Continue Reading: Sanford-Burnham gets $2 million more

Today’s economy is both a stressful and terrifying time for graduates. With Florida’s high unemployment rate, some graduates remain in school longer than necessary rather than face the harsh reality that is today’s job market.

However, life after graduation isn’t as scary of a thought for all graduates. UCF’s Medical Laboratory Science program, offered through the Burnett School of Biomedical Sciences, provides its graduates with countless job placement opportunities upon graduation.

“So few people know about the profession, and there are so few programs across the country,” said Dorilyn Hitchcock, director of the Medical Laboratory Science program. “The UCF program is one of only two university-based MLS programs in Florida. With the majority of individuals working in hospital labs being ‘baby boomers’ and so few students graduating, the rate of retirement is higher than the new grads to fill positions.”

Continue Reading

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.

A new $655-million Veteran’s Affairs hospital is being built, so is a 95-bed children’s specialty hospital by the nonprofit Nemours Foundation. The University of Central Florida is building a medical school and the nonprofit Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute opened a 178,000 square-foot research facility a year ago.

Even with massive construction cranes scattered around the park, vast amounts of acreage waits for future ground-breaking ceremonies and development signs to promote more things to come. The city has a “bio Orlando” pitch.

Five years ago, none of it existed and the land was barren, much like the landscape in eastern Collier County where the Economic Development Council and local government leaders hope to build Collier’s version of a bio-medical park.

Continue Reading

Construction is scheduled to begin in July for a University of Florida research and academic center in the developing “medical city” in Lake Nona.

The UF College of Pharmacy’s academic program will be a principal occupant of the planned four-story, 115,000-square foot building.

The state Board of Governors on Wednesday designated the planned building a center, which means the facility will offer a limited range of courses.

The UF center will be located next to the Sanford-Burnham Institute for Medical Research and near the University of Central Florida’s permanent medical school.

The center will support research in health fields such as pharmacy, dentistry, medicine, nursing and public health. It will include classrooms, administrative and faculty offices and a drug development center.

The state allocated $6 million for design and site preparation in 2008. Lake Nona Research I, LLC donated the more than 5-acre location in October.

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.

Continue Reading

The grant will help establish a Global Center of Excellence in Medical Robotics and Simulation, which will be housed at the Nicholson Center at Florida Hospital Celebration Health.

Training at the Center will focus on capabilities in robotic surgery. Researchers will work to improve military and civilian health care outcomes as well as patient safety, and reduce health care costs. Partners include the Department of Defense, U.S. Army, University of Central Florida’s Institute for Simulation and Training and UCF’s College of Medicine.

Florida Hospital’s Nicholson Center for Surgical Advancement was established in 2001 as a global training and education institute. Since its inception, more than 35,000 physicians have used the Center for training in the newest surgical techniques and technologies.

VA Hospital milestone

The Orlando Veterans Administration Medical Center recently announced the award of a $38.4 million contract to James A. Cummings, Inc., to build the central energy plant for its new hospital at Lake Nona’s emerging “medical city.”

Continue Reading

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.

Continue Reading

The new collaboration unit – known in tech lingo as a Special Interest Group – will include experts from the military training industry, academia and healthcare, according to the National Center for Simulation, an industry trade group based in the Central Florida Research Park.

Its goal is to become a key player in pairing the region’s high-tech capabilities with the training demands of the Medical City complex at Lake Nona, which includes the University of Central Florida’s College of Medicine, the Burnham Institute for Medical Research and the new Veterans Administration and Nemours hospitals.

Continue Reading

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