PORT ST. LUCIE — The battle for hospital supremacy on the Treasure Coast continues.

HCA Inc., which owns two hospitals in St. Lucie County, filed an appeal this week with the 1st District Court of Appeal in Tallahassee to stop Martin Memorial Health Systems from building a new hospital in Port St. Lucie’s Tradition community.

HCA exhausted its state appeals last month. (more…)

PORT ST. LUCIE - And it’s a wrap.

The City Council Monday night unanimously gave final approval to a 20-year lease agreement with Wyndcrest DD Florida Inc. that requires the city to provide the company with 15 acres of land and a 150,000 square-foot movie animation and video game production studio within the Tradition development.

The move, finalizing a $51.8 million deal between the city and Wyndcrest, drew applause from local business and community leaders who urged the council to support the project because it would create much needed, high-paying jobs in the community. Nobody at the meeting spoke out against the project. (more…)

PORT ST. LUCIE — In years of legal battles, Martin Memorial Health Systems has jumped every hurdle standing in the way of its plan to build an 80-bed hospital in Tradition.

This month, it cleared a critical one.

Hospital officials announced today that the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration accepted the recommendation of an administrative law judge to allow the $100 million project to move forward over the objections of HCA Inc., which owns St. Lucie County’s two existing hospitals.

“We feel that this is really a major step,” said Mark Robitaille, Martin Memorial’s president and chief executive officer.

HCA, which has run out of options with the state, now will have to pursue its case through the court system. HCA officials said today that they were disappointed with the decision, but hadn’t decided whether to appeal.

An appeal could take at least a year to resolve. (more…)

PORT ST. LUCIE — The bill to attract a movie special effects studio is finally in, and it’s a potential blockbuster.

The city has put together a proposed $51.8 million deal, in addition to a $20 million state incentive package, to build a movie and video game animation and military simulation studio on 15 acres within Tradition.

City Manager Don Cooper said Thursday the agreement requires Wyndcrest DD Florida Inc. to reimburse the city for the entire financing, except for a $10 million cash grant from developers, through a 20-year annual lease. (more…)

PORT ST. LUCIE — Aegis Communications Group may be relocating its Treasure Coast business across town and adding 500 jobs to its local call-center workforce.

Nate Bray, president of real estate business development for Palm Beach Gardens-based Asset Specialists, said Tuesday his company leased 33,300-square-feet to Aegis over the weekend at the southeast corner of University and Peacock boulevards in St. Lucie West.

“This is 500 new jobs, that’s what they’re telling me,” Bray said. “They came in about four weeks ago and moved really fast on this. They love the county and love the workforce. They’re really excited about staying here.”
(more…)

PORT ST. LUCIE — One of the nation’s top film schools may be headed to the Treasure Coast to work with a Hollywood digital production spin-off and a cast of local college students.

Florida State University’s award-winning film school released a letter of intent Tuesday to partner with the Hobe Sound-based Wyndcrest Holdings LLC., which continues to work out a $30 million state and city incentives package for a 150,000-square-foot digital production studio that would be within the Tradition development.

“The direction they plan to take with the new studio in the development of innovative technologies and storytelling techniques is directly in line with the educational goals of The Film School,” said Frank Patterson, dean of the Florida State University College of Motion Picture, Television and Recording Arts. “It’s a perfect match.”
(more…)

The medical clinic business is booming.

An emergency care clinic in St. Lucie West owned by Martin Memorial Health Systems saw 380 patients in its first week. The clinic, which opened Sept. 1, had an average of 48 patients per day, said Scott Samples, a hospital spokesman.

Located at the health system’s existing facility at 1095 N.W. St. Lucie West Blvd., the clinic is about 9,100 square feet with 12 beds. It is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. (more…)

Martin Memorial Health Systems continued its push to serve the sprawling communities of western St. Lucie County by opening a new emergency care center last week in St. Lucie West.

The center is just 3 miles from the spot in Tradition where the non-profit healthcare organization wants to build a new hospital.

Martin Memorial officials have long seen a need in western St. Lucie County for expanded medical services. The area’s rapid-fire growth four years ago propelled Port St. Lucie into the nation’s top spot for fastest growing cities, and the western sprawl has put residents farther away from the county’s main hospitals — HCA Inc.-owned Lawnwood Regional Medical Center & Heart Institute in Fort Pierce and St. Lucie Medical Center in eastern Port St. Lucie. (more…)

Traffic is beginning to clear on Interstate 95 in the Treasure Coast after being clogged for more than two hours.

Earlier drivers reported up to two southbound lanes closed just south of Tradition at mile marker 116. The delay was possibly due to water from the overnight rains.

Florida Highway Patrol has no reports of crashes.

PORT ST. LUCIE — A scientist who is moving his team of researchers from Montreal to a new institute in Port St. Lucie announced Monday that he has helped uncover a possible method for eradicating HIV from the human body.

Within five to seven years, Rafick-Pierre Sekaly hopes to use the discovery as a platform for clinical trials on residents in St. Lucie County, which in 2006 had the highest rate of HIV and AIDS cases among black residents.

Sekaly, who started this spring as scientific director of VGTI Florida — the East Coast branch of the Vaccine and Gene Therapy Institute at Oregon Health & Science University — pointed out that existing anti-retroviral treatments for HIV only limit the progression of the infection. They don’t eradicate the disease.
The new research could help doctors go a step beyond that, by identifying specific cells where HIV persists, he said during a press conference.

The research suggests that the virus could be eliminated with a dual approach: using medicine that targets viral replication of HIV in the body in combination with drugs that prevent infected memory T-cells from dividing.

Memory T cells are part of the body’s immune system, so antiviral treatments that stop HIV in other parts of the body don’t work in them.

The work was published Sunday in the online version of the journal Nature Medicine and will be published in an upcoming print version of the journal.

The next step is to begin testing the proposed treatment method using animals — including some of the thousands of primates at VGTI’s headquarters in Portland, Ore

Eventually, clinical trials would involve hundreds of people, Sekaly said. He hopes to use as many as possible from St. Lucie County in order to speed the process.

“Recruiting from here is going to be very important for logistical reasons,” he said.

Local HIV and AIDS activists hope the potential breakthrough have an impact on St. Lucie County, which in 2006 had the highest rate of the disease among black residents.

Developments such as Sekaly’s work help people overcome fear of the disease, said Dawn Penny-Jones, an HIV/AIDS program coordinator for the St. Lucie County Health Department.

“I think this will encourage more people to get tested,” she said.

VGTI announced in January that Sekaly would join the new Port St. Lucie branch of the institute, bringing about 36 researchers with him from Montreal, where research money is more difficult to come by.

The state awarded VGTI Florida $60 million last year to open a campus in Port St. Lucie, and the city matched it with $53 million in incentives. Part of the state money is being used to seed Sekaly’s research team.

Also Monday, VGTI announced that it has acquired 8 acres at the Tradition development, where it will build 105,000 square feet of laboratories and offices.

The institute hopes to complete the lab in the summer of 2011.

Asked if he thought a cure for AIDS could emerge from work performed in St. Lucie County, Sekaly said:
“I think it’s better than anywhere else in the world right now.”