Moffitt Cancer Center on Thursday opened a 250,000-square-foot research facility on its new Pasco County campus designed to bring cancer scientists from multiple disciplines together to accelerate the development of new treatments.
The Moffitt Discovery and Innovation Center at Speros will bring together about 250 faculty members, researchers, postdoctoral fellows and support staff working in areas including drug discovery, bioengineering, cancer metabolism and tumor biology. By the end of the year, the five-story building is expected to house 20 faculty laboratories and 12 shared research resources.
Moffitt president and CEO Dr. Patrick Hwu spoke to those attending the grand opening, which included a ribbon-cutting that include hospital officials and local dignitaries.
“When Moffitt opened its doors 40 years ago, we made a promise to contribute to the prevention and cure of cancer,” said Hwu said. “The Discovery and Innovation Center is how we keep that promise for the next 40 years."
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The facility is part of Moffitt’s 775-acre Speros life sciences campus in Land O’ Lakes, where research space sits alongside a 120,000-square-foot outpatient cancer care and a proton therapy center. The campus is intended to bring researchers closer to clinicians and patients, helping move discoveries from the laboratory toward potential treatments.
Dr. Eric Haura, the center's associate director for clinical science, said in a media release that the building’s open laboratory design will encourage collaboration among scientists who previously worked in separate facilities. Bringing together researchers with different expertise also will make it easier to share techniques and equipment, potentially speeding up their work, he said.
"There's a theory that gone are the days where you have sort of just an isolated researcher working in their own group, Haura said. "So the more you can sort of come up with these interesting mixes of things, where you have bioengineering hitting cancer or drug discovery hitting immunology, you know that's where I think we're going to have a lot of new insights."
The facility was designed around the research taking place inside, rather than adapting existing laboratories to new uses. John Schatzle, the senior director of laboratory research operations who helped design the facility, said scientists worked with architects, engineers and construction teams to develop spaces suited to their work.
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The center also includes specialized equipment for analyzing DNA, RNA, proteins and metabolites, as well as microscopy and other shared resources. The equipment will allow scientists to investigate cancer from multiple angles and study potential ways to intervene in the disease.
"Microscopy is as important to cancer research as the telescope is to astronomy," said Greg Sawyer, chair of bioengineering department. "Here at Moffitt, we have a center of excellence in microscopy, which is allowing our researchers an unprecedented opportunity to use state-of-the-art tools to ask new questions and gain new insights in one of the most challenging diseases of our time."
Microscopy is the science of viewing subjects too small to be seen with the naked eye, down to the atomic level.
Schatzle said the center brings together basic scientists studying how cancer develops with bioengineers who can develop new tools and chemists who can create compounds aimed at specific targets. Researchers can then study how potential drugs behave in the body, work that could help determine whether a treatment is ready for clinical trials.
The building was designed to accommodate changing research needs as technologies evolve. Schatzle said more than half of the facility is initially built out, leaving room for future expansion. The labs and research areas are designed to be adapted as the science changes.
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"This is one of the fastest moving times in human history with new technologies coming online," added Sawyer. "One of the things that we've done in this building is to have a flexible structure that allows us to expand, grow, adapt, evolve and stay on the leading edge of the science and technology around cancer engineering."
The center includes radiochemistry lab space for Moffitt’s Radiopharmaceutical Program, launched in August to advance theranostics, which combines diagnostic imaging with targeted radiation therapy. A separate incubator space for early stage biotechnology companies is in the design phase and is expected to open in early 2028.
Moffitt says the broader Speros campus, located off Ridge Road, is backed by more than $1 billion in planned capital investment and is intended to become a hub for cancer research, treatment and biotechnology development.
