Moffitt Opens 250,000-Square-Foot Cancer Research Center at Speros Campus in Pasco County

Moffitt Cancer Center opened a 250,000-square-foot research building on its Speros campus in Land O' Lakes on Thursday, Oct. 22, moving a large share of its laboratory science to Pasco County and putting it next to the clinic where patients are already being treated. The five-story Moffitt Discovery and Innovation Center is designed to bring scientists from different fields under one roof so new cancer treatments can move from the lab bench toward clinical trials faster, according to reporting by WUSF.

The opening is the second major building completed at Speros, the 775-acre life sciences campus off Ridge Road that Moffitt describes as its long-term bet on becoming a global hub for cancer treatment and discovery. For Florida, the project is one of the largest health care and research investments underway anywhere in the state, and it is reshaping a fast-growing stretch of Pasco County along the Suncoast Parkway.

What is inside the new research building

By the end of the year, the building is expected to house 20 faculty laboratories and 12 shared research resources, along with about 250 faculty members, researchers, postdoctoral fellows and support staff, WUSF reported. Their work will span drug discovery, bioengineering, cancer metabolism and tumor biology. Other local coverage of the opening also listed cell therapies and radiopharmaceuticals among the building's research areas.

The lab floors use an open design meant to replace the separate facilities where many of those teams previously worked. Shared equipment includes tools for analyzing DNA, RNA, proteins and metabolites, along with microscopy and other core resources that individual labs would struggle to afford on their own.

Greg Sawyer, who chairs Moffitt's bioengineering department, told WUSF that "microscopy is as important to cancer research as the telescope is to astronomy." He also said the field is in "one of the fastest moving times in human history" as new technologies come online.

Dr. Eric Haura, Moffitt's associate director for clinical science, described the payoff of mixing disciplines, telling the station that combinations such as bioengineering applied to cancer biology can lead to new ideas. John Schatzle, senior director of laboratory research operations, helped design the facility.

A home for Moffitt's radiopharmaceutical push

One of the building's more specialized features is radiochemistry lab space for Moffitt's Radiopharmaceutical Program, which the cancer center launched in August. The program focuses on theranostics, an approach that pairs diagnostic imaging with targeted radiation therapy so the same molecule can both find tumors and deliver radiation to them.

Scientists in the building will also be able to study how potential drugs behave in the body, work that can help determine whether an experimental treatment is ready to move into clinical trials. That step is often one of the slowest and most expensive in cancer drug development, and Moffitt has pitched the Speros research center as a way to shorten it by keeping chemists, engineers, biologists and clinicians in close contact.

Not all of the building is finished. More than half of the space is built out at opening, with the rest held for future growth, according to WUSF. A separate incubator for early-stage biotech companies, known as FORGE, is in the design phase and is expected to open in early 2028.

Research next to patients

The research building sits beside the Moffitt Speros Outpatient Center, the first completed project on the campus. That 120,000-square-foot building held its grand opening on Jan. 9 and began seeing patients later that month, offering cancer screenings, imaging, infusion and specialty clinics. It also houses the Richard M. Schulze Family Foundation Proton Therapy Center, which Moffitt has billed as the first proton therapy center in the Tampa Bay area.

Placing researchers next to clinicians and patients is the central idea behind Speros. At the opening, Moffitt President and CEO Dr. Patrick Hwu tied the new building to the cancer center's founding mission, saying that "when Moffitt opened its doors 40 years ago, we made a promise to contribute to the prevention and cure of cancer."

At the January outpatient opening, Hwu said he hoped the technology on site would make Speros "a magical campus," WUSF reported at the time.

How Speros got here

Moffitt broke ground on Speros on Jan. 20, 2023, in a ceremony attended by state officials. Plans call for only about 500 of the 775 acres to be developed, with roughly 275 acres reserved for conservation, according to coverage of the groundbreaking. Long-range plans released at the time described millions of square feet of lab, office, manufacturing and clinical space spread across dozens of buildings over many years.

Moffitt says the campus is backed by more than $1 billion in planned capital investment. At the groundbreaking, the cancer center projected that thousands of jobs would eventually be based at Speros, with an estimate of roughly 14,000 Moffitt team members at full buildout. Those figures describe a decades-long vision rather than the current workforce: the roughly 250 people moving into the research building are mostly existing Moffitt staff, and WUSF did not report how many are new hires.

The research building's opening came somewhat later than Moffitt's earlier public targets. A 2025 construction update said the Discovery and Innovation Center was scheduled to open in mid-2026, and a Moffitt location page had listed an August opening. Moffitt's broader first phase at Speros, which also includes a biorepository, is scheduled for completion in 2028.

The following timeline shows the campus's major milestones to date.

Why it matters for Pasco County and Tampa Bay

Pasco County has spent years trying to attract higher-wage employers rather than relying on residential growth alone, and Speros is the county's most prominent example. Bill Cronin, president and CEO of the Pasco Economic Development Council, put the scale in perspective at the January opening, telling WUSF that "when you have 775 acres of development, that's twice the size of downtown Tampa."

Hwu said in January that about a third of Moffitt's employees already live in Pasco County, according to coverage of that event, meaning many staff members moving to Speros will have shorter commutes than to the cancer center's main campus in Tampa.

The opening also lands in the middle of what WUSF has called an oncology "arms race" in Tampa Bay. BayCare has been finishing a proton therapy facility at St. Joseph's Hospital in Tampa, Tampa General Hospital has planned a proton therapy center downtown, and Tampa General has partnered with Lakeland Regional Health to expand subspecialty care in Polk County. Large health systems across the region are building satellite cancer centers to reach patients in fast-growing suburbs.

The stakes are high statewide. Cancer is Florida's second-leading cause of death, with roughly 115,000 new cases diagnosed each year, according to the Florida Department of Health figures cited by WUSF.

What's next

Moffitt expects the research building's 20 faculty labs and 12 shared resources to be in place by the end of 2026, with the unfinished floors available for expansion as programs grow. The FORGE incubator, intended to give startup biotech companies space near Moffitt's scientists, is targeted for early 2028, and the cancer center has said additional phases at Speros will follow as it pursues partners for the rest of the campus.

The long-term test for Speros will be whether it can turn proximity into results: shorter timelines from discovery to clinical trial, more trials open to Florida patients, and enough private investment to fill the hundreds of acres still waiting to be developed in Land O' Lakes.