More than a hundred central Florida business leaders gathered in Lake Nona’s Medical City to learn about the latest life sciences and health innovations during Orlando Business Journal’s “Doing Business in Medical City” event on April 13, 2017. Leaders from anchor institutions Guidewell Innovation Center, Nemours Children’s Hospital, Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute (SBP) and Tavistock touted numerous examples of collaborations and tech innovations all unique to the area’s health ecosystem.
Panelists highlighted several important collaborative projects taking shape inside of Medical City research labs. “The way we approach basic science and biomedical discovery is through interaction,” said Layton Smith, PhD, director of drug discovery and pharmacology at SBP. “We need to be—and are—interacting with partners like the University of Central Florida, the University of Florida and more. So essentially, what we’ve built here is a node in a network of biomedical research.” One of the recent collaborations he described involves a project with UCF researchers on Zika. Also discussed was an ongoing partnership with the Mayo Clinic and the Michael J. Fox Foundation on personalized medicine approaches for Parkinson’s disease.
Panelists also emphasized the role of people partnerships in broadening community health and wellness initiatives in the area.
Jim Zboril, president of Tavistock Development Co. LLC, described collaboration as a hallmark of Lake Nona and highlighted the built environment as a foundation for residents to live, work, and play. The Lake Nona Life Project, for example, allows “citizen scientists” who live and work in Lake Nona to take part in research studies happening in their backyard. He also provided a glimpse of the latest projects taking place inside of Lake Nona Town Center, which will include a new fitness center and cable water park, as well as new developments in the adjacent Lake Nona Sports and Performance District, which is home to the USTA’s National Campus and Orlando City Soccer’s training facility.
Additionally, new tech innovations are fast-tracking a “wellness without walls” approach to healthcare delivery. Renee Finley, president of GuideWell Innovation, described how new wearable sensor technology displayed in Lake Nona’s intelligent home WHIT (Wellness, Health, Innovation, and Technology), can track activities of daily living, including how many times the refrigerator is opened in a day and movements in the home. ‘Those things can be indicators of other health conditions,” she said.
Meanwhile, Nemours’ telehealth services are making the demand for access to healthcare easier by providing a gateway for the consumer to get in touch with a specialist. “We have an app where you can access any one of our pediatric providers for urgent consultation any time of the day or night—24/7,” said Andre Hebra, MD, chief medical officer of Nemours Children’s Hospital. “And beyond that, we have telehealth services to provide specialty consultations to some of our partnership hospitals.”