It’s sniffles season. People with asthma commonly suffer from allergies, too. Help your patients understand their allergic triggers with ImmunoCAP™ Specific IgE blood tests. And with this lab ordering guide, providers can browse region-specific profiles to help patients identify local allergic triggers. Learn more.
When thinking of medical innovation hotspots, Boston, New York, or even Houston might come to mind.
But hundreds of miles away—in the land of sweltering heat, theme parks, and the nebulous Florida man—there’s a master-planned community called Lake Nona that houses a 650-acre “medical city.”
The then-empty pasture was bought in 1996 by real estate firm Tavistock Development Company, and in 2006, the medical city kicked off when the state approved construction for the University of Central Florida (UCF) College of Medicine. This attracted hospitals, health tech startups, and research institutes, all supplemented by government funds as part of an effort to add high-paying biomedical jobs in the state.
In addition to UCF’s medical school, the area added more institutions such as Nemours Children’s Hospital in 2012, a University of Florida academic and medical center in 2012, the 1.2 million-square-foot Orlando Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and its national simulation center in 2016, the GuideWell Innovation Center for entrepreneurs in 2016, the Johnson & Johnson Human Performance Institute in 2019, the HCA Healthcare UCF Lake Nona Hospital in 2021, and smaller startups like the Fountain Life precision diagnostic center in 2023.
In 2012, the annual, invite-only Lake Nona Impact Forum started and grew alongside the community. The 2025 conference, held Feb. 26–28, had over 700 attendees and included speakers like Johnson & Johnson CEO Joaquin Duato, Oracle CEO Safra Catz, Cost Plus Drugs co-founder Mark Cuban, and former President George W. Bush. Topics included longevity moonshots, gene editing, and the disruptive future of medicine.
Lake Nona
Gloria Caulfield, founder and executive director of the Lake Nona Impact Forum and president of the nonprofit Lake Nona Institute, spoke to Healthcare Brew about building a health innovation hub from the ground up.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
What is the ultimate goal of Lake Nona?
There is a lot that is changing very quickly in medicine, with the advent and the proliferation of artificial intelligence, and now quantum [computing]. There are technologies that seemed science fiction that are now coming to the forefront. And I think that’s where Lake Nona plays a role. We have great anchor institutions and organizations here, like the University of Central Florida College of Medicine, like the Orlando VA healthcare campus, but we still have a great opportunity to inform the future of medicine because we’re not so old that we’re not nimble and adaptable. I definitely see us having a role in things like the future of biotech and longevity medicine.
What about the Lake Nona Impact Forum? How did that come about?
[Lake Nona is] a very inspiring project with a big vision. But how do we think about the future of a project like this when it was still relatively unknown? And so I had this idea of bringing a high-quality, Aspen Institute-like event to Lake Nona where great minds could get together annually, where important conversations were had on the leading edge of health, public health, and policy.
We want important work to be spawned and innovated from the Lake Nona Impact Forum. Some of those great things that will emanate out of here could happen directly in Lake Nona, or they can happen [after] in other places.
How does Lake Nona compare to other health innovation hubs?
There were [best practices] that I learned from different pockets of the country and world. But I’m not really aware of anybody else that has this exact multidimensional development at this scale. This is a 17-square-mile project. There is a very big residential focus, very different from a research triangle [in North Carolina] that has a lot of businesses but not really any residents. It’s very different than Houston that has a lot of medical and clinical excellence, but no residential component.
When this all started, national awareness was low. Since then, Lake Nona and its story has been featured in outlets including Fortune and the New York Times. How do you feel about this increased awareness—have you reached your goal?
We just produced our 13th edition, and I would say we’ve absolutely come a long way in terms of awareness, brand building, reputation building. Do I think that we can sit back and say we’re all done? No, not at all. I think there’s still a lot more work to be done. There’s still a lot more recognition for what we’re doing here. But as you can see from this last [conference], we’ve been fortunate enough to attract Fortune 100 companies—some of the biggest ones, some of the most strategic ones—to come here and speak, participate.
Correction 04/08/2025: This article has been updated to reflect that “Medical City” is a section within Lake Nona, not Lake Nona itself.