Moffitt Cancer Center Spiros FL update

1:17:05Good morning. David Engel, Planning and Economic Development Director. It's my pleasure today to introduce the board. Uh you'll you know him but reintroducing Doctor Patrick

1:17:15Who.

1:17:16Uh Doctor Who is the CEO and president of the Moffert Moffitt uh Cancer Treatment and Research Center, and he is here to give an overview and a status report on Spiroz FL. Thank you. Thank you.

1:17:34Thank

1:17:34you, David. Welcome.

1:17:36Yeah, sir.

1:17:37Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you to the commissioners. We're just very excited about our partnership together and what we're building here in Pasco County. We do feel that we will develop treatments here that will go across the globe. Uh, and we're excited by what's happening together. We could not do this without uh the commission. County support from the county to the sheriff's office to the EDC. We've had nothing but support. We've been to with the EDC to Japan

1:18:07to try to drum up business together. We've been to Europe with them. And so it's just been very exciting to be here with all of you. We think there's tremendous potential for the future.

1:18:22So we feel is a as you know, this uh spiros campus spiros means hope in Latin. Hope for patients, hope for cancer patients, hope for patients with autoimmunity, with infectious diseases. We think we can develop this with the state of the science today. Um with Moffitt anchoring that down. It's a 775-acre campus. We have phase 1A, which is a number of buildings already going up with

1:18:53all of your help that we're excited about. We feel there are a number of focuses in this campus. One is delivering the best care to patients today. So we have pati uh patient care facilities. We want to get them closer to the patient so they don't have to drive in to our other campuses. And so that's uh one of the major focuses. We have partnerships coming along with other hospital systems. Yeah. And then we want to uh work

1:19:23with biotech uh to develop the treatments for tomorrow. It's uh very important to develop things in the lab, but unless we have a company behind it, it's not gonna scale across the globe. So we do feel that bringing in biotech companies and big pharma, small pharma is gonna be important to this in order to scale our influence. Uh and a third, we want this to be a great place. uh to work. So we want to attract the best and brightest uh employees throughout

1:19:53the the country.

1:19:55Notice the cyclist down there on the right. I just wanted to

1:19:58draw

1:19:58your attention to that.

1:20:01Thank you. Commissioner. So um uh we do feel everyone wants one of these in their backyard, a big biotech cluster. Uh and so what's gonna distinguish us, and number one, it's we're all working together. It's uh we've had such tremendous support. We don't think that happens in every community, uh by the county, by the state. Uh we uh think um uh Florida is a very business friendly community. And we have a strong anchor in MAFA Cancer Center.

1:20:32We do look around the country and where these are successful, it's where you have a very strong anchor. And we have we we work very hard with our patient care. We have uh six over 600,000 uh outpatient visits a year, and 90,000 unique patients. patients yes um every year so that provides a a background not only for patient care but for research. We do uh $300 million worth of research

1:21:02a year, which is funded through our operating margin, federal grants and state grants, as well as philanthropy. And we think this is going to be a very, very strong anchor to develop this biotech cluster.

1:21:18And we're really excited about one particular technology that we're experts in and treated 1,300 patients more than anyone in the world on, and that's T cell therapy. T cells are an immune cell of the body that can go out and seek cancers. In this uh video, the T cells are the little blue cells. It's like David versus Goliath. The tumors are the big green cells. А ті сел сі та тюмер, де діва кіс одеф. uh and they secrete proteins to poke

1:21:48holes in the tumor and the tumor dies as indicated by the orange dye. When the orange dye comes in that's the dead tumor. And then the immune cell will just go to another tumor cell and kill it. And you go to another tumor cell and kill it. Well we've learned to take these immune cells out of the body, put genes in them to help them even uh kill the cancer better, recognize the cancer, function better. Uh we've learned to grow them to billions and give them back uh to patients. Uh and so uh

1:22:19with this, and the important part is these immune cells also live for decades in the body. So Giving the patients what they want. Every patient that comes to us wants a long-term durable response. And so we do feel that these treatments will help to anchor and start to galvanize our biotech community. This is cell therapy companies. There are thousands of cell therapy companies out there. They want to work with Mafa Cancer Center, and these are the first. biotech

1:22:49companies that we think we're gonna be able to attract It's very important that these immune cells live for a long time in the body. Uh a couple weeks ago I had a patient come to me. We had treated him when he was just out of high school. We had to wait till he was 18 so he'd be eligible for our trial. Uh we gave him immune cells. Um and at that time uh his melanoma, it started in the skin, went throughout his body, including his brain. He had a bleeding brain mat. Uh he um pretty much wiped out his cancer a few uh a couple years ago. Ago

1:23:20he came to my clinic with his baby that he uh had after going to college, getting married, had a job. And now I I just saw him a couple weeks ago. His wife is pregnant with her with her second child. And so it's just very fulfilling that these uh kinds of therapies can Have the impact that they have. And we feel that by bringing in biotech companies uh that can uh produce these therapies, innovate them, they're already FDA approved for a lot of the malignant. leukemias, the the

1:23:50blood tumors, but now the next step is to get them to work for all the solid tumors, which cause ninety percent of the deaths from cancer. And so that's where we're gonna head um and that's why it's very meaningful what we're doing together. So we really appreciate that. Um This is just what we're building there. If you go there, uh we'll welcome you anytime. I know a lot of you have been there. Uh we have uh uh a proton center uh going up. A proton Is a particle that we can hit

1:24:20at the cancer and it also stops. So if the patient has left breast cancer, it will hit the breast cancer but won't go further into the heart. That's why it's so important to have proton for certain diseases where the disease is close to a structure that you don't want to hit. And the proton, there are a lot of people who have proton centers. This is a State of the art, really best in the country machine that we're gonna get from a very high-end place in Belgium that's

1:24:51gonna be able to do and deliver all of the proton energy that would normally take 30 minutes in less than a second. With that, it would just shred the cancer. So we're very excited to get this up. The walls are going up, walls are very thick for something like this. And pretty soon we're gonna have the equipment. Equipment in a few months coming in through the port and shipped up to Pasco, our property there. And so we're really excited about that. We have an ambulatory treatment center that will have IV therapy, radiation therapy, everything that the patient will not have to travel

1:25:21out of Pasco County for now. We have have a uh 300,000 square foot research center there uh that's gonna help to innovate. We're gonna have uh dry labs. We we're moving our engineering team there. It's um really important to have uh the hard sciences mixed with the biolog biological sciences. So we're bringing in we have we've had a machine learning group uh for uh four years now way before it was fashionable And so AI, machine learning, very

1:25:52important. Uh we're gonna have that housed there as well as our engineering group. Our head engineer, Greg Sawyer, he should come here and talk to you guys sometime. He's very special. He's had melanoma himself. throughout the body, came to Mafia Cancer Center ten years ago, got a curative immunotherapy trial, and then he switched from working on the Mars rover to cancer. And so he's a very compelling story. And and so Um he's watched his boys grow up and he's just dedicated to cancer. He's already started companies.

1:26:22He's bringing in engineering companies. He's gonna do things like scale cell therapy, because to grow billions of immune cells, it's hard to do that for the 10 million people across the globe that die of cancer every year or so. We're um he's gonna help us scale that. It's really gonna be an engineer that's gonna help us do that. So that's all gonna be

1:26:45I want to thank you again. Um, and I have a number of people from Moffat together today here. Uh Jamie Wilson, uh our head of uh government relations, John Algier, our uh VP of uh construction operations out there. We have uh Merritt Martin, uh my chief of staff as as well. So happy to take any questions and I wanna again uh just t tell you how much we appreciate your help. and collaboration. Ms. Starkey.

1:27:13Well, I don't have any questions. I just wanna uh thank you for coming and giving us an update. Um I actually have not made it to one of the tours, so I I need to get that scheduled. Uh but we're just so excited that you're coming and of course we we are here for anything that you need. So um I'm I don't know, my I'm just so proud that's it it's in our county and we we talk about it around the world, how how special this is and how special you are. So Mr. Mariano.

1:27:43Thank you. It's just amazing what you have for technology coming our way and and the facility you're building out here and what what a great addition you're gonna be to this county. So Greatly appreciate you coming and share sharing with us what's going on.

1:27:55Thank you, Mr. Commissioner Yeager.

1:27:58Yeah, very impressive. I I love that we're gonna have this right in our own backyard 'cause I if I m understand correctly, it's it's Miami and Jacksonville, right? With the proton therapy?

1:28:11And I think this is gonna be uh probably the the most up to date state of the art machine in the country, so. Really excited about that.

1:28:18Yeah. And also just like recruiting. You guys are gonna be able to recruit the best of the best because who who wouldn't wanna live, work and play right here in Pasco?

1:28:28Absolutely. It's uh it's wonderful to be in the heart of one of the fastest growing counties uh in the country with bicycles and everything uh that people want uh to have. It's gonna be a wonderful area to live in.

1:28:41For

1:28:41Wavel.

1:28:43I'm serious. You gotta give them a good quality of life if they want to live here.

1:28:50No, but it'll bring their the quality of life that we'll offer will bring help bring their employees here.

1:28:56Either Doctor Who, uh You know, just incredibly grateful of all the places you all landed. You landed close to home and landed in Pasco. Half of what you said went way over my head uh as far as the medical ease of what you're talking about. But just incredibly grateful that Moffat's here and to Speaker Moffat who really kicked off, you know, what Moffat Cancer Center has become today. And very grateful for your partnership and having USF in our Backyard and um just excited to see what the future holds, not just for employment and economic

1:29:27benefit and national and international notoriety but for the lives of of uh you know, folks of all ages that we might be able to save and uh, you know, see what their futures might be able to do, uh, because they had an opportunity to live. So thank you for all of your work. You know, what you're doing, uh you know, you're gonna gonna bless generations to come. So thank you.

1:29:50Mr. Chairman M I have one more thing. Um so we have a program that we we help fund in the county that Um I was involved in starting called AM Skills. It's American Manufacturing Skills. We used to call it Skills Initiative, but now we just say AMSkills. It's a it's um right now it's a thirteen thousand square foot training center in um robotics, mechatronics. all things manufacturing and we are we got money from the legislature to expand our high school program. So we will

1:30:21be opening up um Um a uh We're not gonna call it a manufacturing academy. I I don't recall the name of it. Um but we're gonna be in um the high school in Angeline with our Amskills Academy that will be uh a a feeder for um workers for you. So we're excited to have that relationship with um Amskills and Moffitt. And I'd love to give you a tour uh over here. It's over here on holiday, but we go out into the communities, but

1:30:51certainly we'd love to give you a tour and we've been called one of the best One of the best in the nation as far as a training pr program goes, so

1:31:00Well thank you. Uh we're gonna need that. We are gonna need uh for example to grow these immune cells to billions, we're gonna need um workers. Um we're gonna need workers with two year degrees, with four-year degrees, with six-year degrees, with eight year degrees. We're gonna need the whole gamut uh of workers to help us. save these lives. Not only in Pasco County, but we're going to develop the treatments that we think we can go scale throughout the globe. So thank you.

1:31:27Yep. Doctor Hugh I can't I can't tell you enough how grateful I am for y you and the Moffat team to be here in Pasco County. Um cancer disease is is very terrible to everyone and doesn't doesn't eliminate anyone. Anyone can get this disease and it's very harmful to all all of our citizens. So You being here and the fact that they have the being close to Moffat and be able to get the right kind of cure in the future that We

1:31:57hope that one day we see a total cure, which I know you're working toward, but Um it's it's so grateful that I am of of what y'all do and And being here and being close to our citizens, so Uh it will pay dividends and I hope you come up with that cur Sooner than later.

1:32:16So but thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And the death rates are starting to come down and we do think working together we can drive them down further, faster. So thank you very much. Okay.

1:32:29Thank you.

1:32:32Okay, Mr. Kavala.

1:32:34And w and we we all want to come out when that uh proton machine is coming up From uh the airport. Get out there and wave flags or do something, shoot fireworks.

1:32:45I think we need to have a proton cam so we can monitor.

1:32:48I'm sure they'll have a drone following it, right, Merritt? It's good you're gonna have a drone over that um proton? Yeah. It's gonna be an exciting day.

1:32:57Might open up a wormhole. We had to be careful.