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.

The Greater Orlando Aviation Authority has joined the list of developers and landowners hoping to cash in on the “medical city” that’s rising out of pasture land in southeastern Orange County.

For more than 20 years, GOAA has owned an 1,800-acre parcel of vacant land south of the airport, originally purchased to provide wetlands mitigation to offset development at the airport itself.

But now the land is surrounded by some of the hottest development projects in Central Florida. And GOAA planners are dusting off plans — first drafted in mid-decade — to turn the so-called “Poitras property,” named for its previous owners, into a mixed-use development site over the next decade or so.

To the north, Orlando’s future “medical city” is rising — a children’s and a veterans’ hospital, along with the new University of Central Florida medical school, the Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute, and a new University of Florida academic and research center.

To the east sits the upscale Lake Nona mixed-use community, while due south is some of Osceola County’s hottest property, including the 12,000-acre “Northeast District” project proposed on the Desert Ranch property owned by the Mormon church.

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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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CFB: What areas of simulation are showing the greatest potential for growth?

Baptiste: In the near term, it has to be medical simulation, especially with the recent decision by the Veteran’s Administration to establish a national center of excellence for medical simulation at the new VA hospital being built at Lake Nona. That decision, and the entire medical-city concept at Lake Nona, is a real bright spot for this region and the simulation industry. I still don’t see the level of funding from the government or the private sector that we’ll need to expand this capability. But I think that is going to grow. The new VA center and other developments are going to help spur that, and the dollars will follow. I think this area has a real opportunity to take the lead in medical simulation.

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Burnham, the La Jolla, Calif.-based research institution that’s among the top four recipients of grant funding from the National Institutes of Health, will have plenty of company soon enough. In addition to the Burnham, the site known at least for the time being as “Medical City” encompasses:

• The University of Central Florida’s new College of Medicine, including the Burnett Medical Science Building, both nearing completion
• The M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, which will operate on the fifth floor of the Burnett building until it builds its own facility nearby
• The Nemours Children’s Hospital, now under construction
• The Orlando Veterans Affairs Medical Center, a more than half-billion-dollar facility already funded by Congress and expected to be finished by 2012
• A University of Florida Academic and Research center planned close to the Burnham building.

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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.

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For the first week, we are offering 3 free job postings to all employers. If you have a position to fill, visit the job board, and create your listing. When it asks you to pay, just close out of the window, and we’ll waive the fee. The job listing will remain live for 30 days, at which time you can renew for $30 for an additional 30 days.

We hope to add a place for applicants to post their resumes, but that may end up somewhere on the regular NarcoosseeFL site.

Click here to visit the Lake Nona Job Board

The Veterans Administration has awarded a $9.2 million contract to RBVetCo to begin the site work, utilities and the main loop road for the new Orlando VA Medical Center.

The Pittsburgh-based general contractor is expected to start work later this month.

Continue Reading RBVetCo gets $9.2M Orlando VA contract

In addition to healthcare, this project will create jobs and a lot of them. During the construction phase alone, there will be 5,000 jobs created.

WFTV has a great article on the new construction as well as video footage. Check out the entire story Next Piece Of Medical City Begins Construction

What are your thoughts on Lake Nona’s Medical City? Are you excited to see the growth and jobs coming to the area? Tell us your thoughts in the comment section below.