Economic Development News

for Bioimaging, both in the Jupiter area near Palm Beach, helped serve as a catalyst for the life sciences industry throughout South Florida.

Continuing up the road north, Central Florida is not only home to several new life sciences-focused developments, but it has also played a major role in recent high-profile site selection competitions. For example, Orlando-based generic drug company Nephron Pharmaceuticals maintains a significant presence in Orlando, and included the city on a recent short list for a new operation that would have created more than 100 professional jobs. While Florida didn't win that time around (the project went to South Carolina — see the March 2012 issue of Site Selection), it continues to focus its attraction efforts on new biopharma R&D, clinical trial and manufacturing facilities, and it has had other recent successes.

High on the local development radar is the 7,000-acre (650-hectare) Lake Nona Medical City under construction by the Tavistock Group, which will include the University of Central Florida College of Medicine, the Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute at Lake Nona, the Orlando VA Medical Center and the University of Florida Research and Academic Center. Not coincidental to its large number of retirees, this concentration of medical centers provides life sciences companies with a continually growing number of hospitals and research institutions with whom there are partnership opportunities.

If virtual spaces can claim a "real world" place, Florida is becoming known for it, as the state's many newly constructed medical and life sciences facilities are home to multiple cutting-edge virtual training and simulation centers such as the 35,000-sq.-ft.  (3,252-sq.-m.) training facility for a new medical simulation system called the Simulated Learning Enhancement and Advance Research Network at Lake Nona. Similarly, the University of South Florida's Center for Advanced Medical Learning and Simulation (CAMLS) in the Tampa Central Business District will be a state-of-the-art, 90,000-sq.-ft. (8,361-sq.-m.) medical conference facility. CAMLS will feature a training center for USF Health's Graduate Biomedical Degree program,