Florida's 'medical city' to move off drawing board

Florida's Lake Nona "medical city" project is finally breaking groung as construction begins on the University of Central Florida's College of Medicine and its Burnett College of Biomedical Sciences, as well as the Burnham Institute for Medical Research. All three facilities are scheduled to open in the latter half of 2009. UCF hopes to eventually add a school of nursing at the site in southeastern Orlando, though that would be years down the road. Also planned is a cancer-research institute that will likely be run jointly by M.D. Anderson Cancer Center Orlando and UCF, and a long-awaited VA hospital, but construction on the latter facility won't begin until 2009 at the earliest, with an expected opening date of 2012.