LAND O' LAKES, Fla. — It's the biggest expansion since Moffitt was started 40 years ago — 775 acres in Land O’ Lakes will soon be the site for a new Moffitt Cancer Center campus known as Speros FL.
It will be larger than downtown Tampa. This is a big investment with $600 million in the first phase from Moffitt, the state and Pasco County, while $1 billion is coming from the private sector.
Moffitt is going to be just one piece of this life sciences innovation park. Its leaders are looking to collaborate with other partners for things like ultra-low temperature freezers to keep specimens, a data partner focused on cyber security and even another community hospital.
The vice president of development, construction and operations at Speros says the team looked at Pasco County for this expansion because county leaders were excited about the opportunity, knowing the Angeline housing development was close by so people could live, work and play.
Ultimately, it seemed like a good fit for the project.
“They were just they were looking for larger tracts of land for that what we call collaboration and collision, right? We want folks from other companies for profit, not for-profit, education, whatever it is to be there, and you know, grab a cup of coffee with our researchers, they're having a cup of coffee, and they start talking and you know, what we come they come up with something, and it helps our cancer patients, or it helps, you know, the population involved,” John Allgeier said.
Speros will be just off the Suncoast Parkway and Ridge Road. It is supposed to be the epicenter for the next generation of cancer treatments with 16 million square feet of lab, office, manufacturing and clinical space. Crews broke ground on the project back in January. Eventually, there will be 140 buildings on the site and more than 6 miles of new roads, including an expansion of Ridge Road.
On the Moffitt campus, there's going to be a big focus on radiation and proton therapies. Doctors say proton therapies can be beneficial to minimize damage to other areas surrounding a tumor. Allgeier anticipates the campus will open in late 2025 or early 2026. He says the proton research will probably start in mid-2026.
While the property is 775 acres, Allgeier says they’re only developing 500 of them.
“If we wanted to, we could develop more,” Allgeier said. “So on top of just wanting to do what we want to do from a cancer standpoint, there's a lot of wetlands up there, there's a lot of nature, those other 250 or almost 300 acres, it's all wetlands. We have designed the campus around all the existing cypress trees, oak trees, all those types of things,” Allgeier said.
He says when someone’s getting an infusion, they can look out at Cypress trees and not the wall of another building, so it won’t be a concrete jungle.
“We don't want to bring in any, any plant that is not already on the property," Allgeier added. “We got there two years ago, it was just a big forest, so we don't want to bring in a bunch of palm trees and make it look like Miami, right?
"We want to bring in the oaks and you know, keep we're gonna keep as many oaks and things we oak, cypress trees, magnolias, those are the types of things we got a whole list, we got to lay a management plan on what's out there.”
