Tampa Bay health care and research leaders are making a push to position the region as a center for one of the fastest-growing areas in cancer treatment, betting that demand for specialized manufacturing, workforce training and precision medicine could generate thousands of jobs and reshape part of the region’s life sciences economy.
A coalition led by Speros and Moffitt Cancer Center launched Wednesday with plans to build a regional ecosystem around radiopharmaceutical therapies, a category of cancer drugs that combines radioactive isotopes with targeted treatments designed to locate and attack tumors at the cellular level.
The initiative, called the Florida Oncology and Radiopharmaceutical Growth Engine, or FORGE, includes Embarc Collective, the University of South Florida and Pasco-Hernando State College. Organizers project the effort could create roughly 4,000 jobs and generate $2.6 billion in economic impact across Florida over the next decade…