Two decades ago, Sarasota held little appeal for physicians who wanted to do medical research. Cancer specialist Dr. James Fiorica remembers those years. Sarasota Memorial Hospital recruited him from Tampa’s H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center back then, and one of his requests before he committed to the move was to bring his team so he could continue his gynecologic oncology research. “I wanted to provide new drugs for the community and make sure my ovarian cancer patients had the top-notch drugs,” he says.

For doctors like Fiorica, who are coming from academic research centers, continuing their research and advancing medical science are priorities. They need infrastructure, technology, grant support and staff to collect data and handle patient support—resources community hospitals rarely have. That’s why Sarasota Memorial Hospital mapped out a strategy to bring in additional top specialists in cancer, cardiology, neurosurgery, interventional radiology and more, who were willing to leave academic centers as long as they could conduct or participate in clinical trials. And the more top physicians who headed here, the easier it was to recruit other elite doctors.

“This has all been successful and multiplied—so now we have a new facility to house everybody and get people thinking together,” says Fiorica, who is also Sarasota Memorial’s chief medical officer.

That new facility is the Kolschowsky Research and Education Institute on the hospital’s Sarasota campus, which opened in 2025, in large part due to a $25 million gift from one of Fiorica’s patients, whom he had successfully treated for ovarian cancer. The 82,000-square-foot center was built for research, clinical education and residency programs. All the clinical trials are chosen with local patients in mind. These aren’t Phase I early research trials; they tend to be Phase II and III trials with treatments that are almost ready to be approved and that local patients can take advantage of right now. In 2025, the institute had 226 active research studies and 7,356 participants.

“We wanted to make sure we were targeting our patient population,” Fiorica says.

For example, interventional radiologists in Sarasota were seeing many people come in with thrombosis and pulmonary blood clots. “They asked us, ‘Can we initiate a clinical trial to try to declot these people with new devices?’” Fiorica says. Other trials are testing new chemotherapy drugs for cancer; investigating a new approach to prevent atrial fibrillation after heart surgery; trying out a less invasive procedure to replace a heart tricuspid valve; and using artificial intelligence in imaging technology to pinpoint the removal of a specific cancerous part of a lung. One nurse-initiated study, funded by another philanthropist, used adorable-looking robotic cats and dogs for dementia patients in the hospital to see if the robots would make them more comfortable.  The result was a resounding yes for these patients, with better heart and blood pressure numbers, fewer falls, shorter hospital stays and a greater likelihood of going home.

And in the institute’s simulation and immersion labs, medical professionals from doctors to paramedics and firefighters train for emergency scenarios like a child drowning at the beach or a car accident and watch the patient being airlifted by helicopter to the hospital’s helipad, taken to a trauma room and treated.

“It’s very rare that community hospitals have something like this,” says Fiorica of the institute’s caliber of research. “The level that we’re doing it at is quite unprecedented.”