Florida hub partnership assessment (internal)¶
Status: internal strategy note — not for external circulation.
Date: 2026-09-15
Audience: Goliath Research leadership.
Home: Winter Haven, FL (Polk / Heartland).
External proposal this note retargets: florida-community-access-partnership-brief.md.
Related: GoliathOmics Gaps.md (Wang/Moffitt methods completeness — science, not BD).
Decision¶
Do not pursue Moffitt as the IT, enterprise-AI, or FCIF lead partner. Moffitt has already committed to a commercial shared fabric (Oracle Cloud Infrastructure bare-metal tenancy, NVIDIA NeMo/Clara, Deloitte implementation, plus ThinkHub tumor boards and Dicom/Aperio digital pathology). GoliathOmics’ offer — no seat licenses, PostgreSQL, run-anywhere GPUs, grant dollars to wet lab — competes with that spend. Chasing Office of Innovation / shared GPU tenancy wastes the October FCIF cycle.
Do keep citing published Wang/Wong method classes (EM-Seq MHB/MHL + Cox) as open science. Concordance does not require Moffitt’s ML department or OCI. See GoliathOmics Gaps.md.
Do retarget community access to places that cannot or will not pay Moffitt-class OpEx: academic HPC (UF HiPerGator, Sylvester Pegasus) and Central Florida community systems (AdventHealth Winter Haven → Orlando TRI).
Mission vs Moffitt’s stack¶
The brief’s public mission is lowest-cost access for Florida’s population, not “win Tampa’s enterprise AI RFP.”
| Moffitt shared technology | Relation to GoliathOmics |
|---|---|
| T1V ThinkHub (tumor boards) | Out of product scope |
| Dicom Unifier + Leica Aperio GT 450 | Out of product scope (PACS/pathology) |
| OCI + NVIDIA NeMo, clinical LLMs, trial matching, DRL adaptive therapy, radiomics | Adjacent hospital AI; not our pipeline. Do not pitch as a replacement. |
GoliathOmics is a portable multiomics / SaMD-shaped science engine. Pitching it as Moffitt’s shared platform is a category error.
Florida institutions (fit for our offer)¶
Sources: public descriptions of each center’s compute posture (including the 2026-09-14 Gemini share Moffitt Cancer Center Shared Technologies) plus Goliath’s Winter Haven location.
| Institution | Compute posture | Fit for free/cheap toolchain | Role |
|---|---|---|---|
| UF Health Cancer Center / HiPerGator (Gainesville) | On-prem DGX SuperPOD; CapEx already paid; GatorTron is their NLP, not a blocker for epigenomics cores | High. They want more samples per GPU-hour, not another cloud bill. | Preferred FCIF/Bankhead-Coley eligible lead + HPC host. Entry: Bioinformatics Core / computational biology shared resource. Hurdle: nf-core/Nextflow culture — show wall-clock vs Bismark/CPU. |
| Sylvester / UM Frost IDSC Pegasus (Miami) | Academic HPC partition, Slurm chargeback; epigenetics + liquid biopsy + diverse catchment | Highest scientific fit for pangenome + cfDNA methylation. | Co-lead or epigenetics PI. Entry: Cancer Epigenetics, Onco-Genomics SR, Precision Medicine. Hurdle: existing Nextflow/Snakemake. |
| AdventHealth (Winter Haven → Orlando TRI / interventional genomics) | Lean: Epic, Azure, FDA-cleared vendor AI. No supercomputer. | Highest local / equity fit. They buy turnkey tools because they cannot afford OCI. | Clinical + Polk/Heartland access arm. Not a sole NCI-style grant lead. |
| Orlando Health | Same lean-vendor pattern | Secondary clinical site | Implementation / cohort, not platform owner |
| Mayo Clinic Florida (Jacksonville) | Mayo Clinic Cloud on GCP, Rochester IT | Low as lead — same class of enterprise lock-in as Moffitt OCI | Skip unless an investigator-initiated PI comes to us |
| Moffitt (Tampa) | OCI OpEx + Deloitte + NVIDIA shared tenancy | Wrong partner for deployment | Do not chase Innovation/shared GPU. Optional: public methods only |
FCIF still wants a licensed Florida cancer institute as lead. That should be UF or Sylvester, not Moffitt. Goliath Research (Winter Haven) is the Florida technology co-investigator. AdventHealth is the underserved-county clinical arm (the equity story reviewers score).
Geography (Winter Haven)¶
Polk / Heartland has high cancer burden and weaker NCI-center access than Tampa or Miami. AdventHealth Winter Haven is the local door into AdventHealth Cancer Institute / Translational Research Institute in Orlando (~1 hour). UF is ~2 hours north; Sylvester ~3 hours south. Compute should live on their already-cheap HPC, not a new commercial tenancy we ask them to buy.
Do not sell “we replace OCI.” Sell BYOC on HiPerGator, Pegasus, or a small hospital GPU.
Two tracks (do not wait for one giant MOU)¶
Track A — grant-eligible science (before FCIF Period 2, 22 Oct 2026)
UF Bioinformatics Core and/or Sylvester Cancer Epigenetics. Ask for a pilot queue allocation (not a cloud RFP): 20–50 de-identified cfDNA or WGBS samples; wall-clock vs nf-core/Bismark; $0 software license line in the budget.
Track B — local access
AdventHealth Winter Haven / Lakeland Regional / county DOH. Residual plasma, community screening overlay, “compute in Florida, software free.” They do not need ThinkHub or Aperio.
Wang methods as science, not Moffitt procurement
Offer cfdna_emseq_mhl_survival to UF/Sylvester PIs as an open implementation of a published method. Concordance with mHapSuite does not require Tampa enterprise IT.
Grant aims (retargeted)¶
12-month FCIF example: deploy on UF or Sylvester HPC; process a Polk/Central Florida retrospective set via AdventHealth; publish locked metrics; document $0 software licenses. Drop “500–1,000 patients on Moffitt’s cluster.”
Federal: ITCR U24 (open informatics) fits UF/Sylvester better than PAR-25-338 with Moffitt as the industrial-cloud site.
What not to do¶
- Pitch GoliathOmics as Moffitt’s shared enterprise platform.
- Lead with tumor boards, digital pathology, NeMo, or trial-matching LLMs.
- Spend the October FCIF cycle on Moffitt Innovation if they will not leave OCI.
- Treat Mayo GCP the same way as Moffitt OCI.
- Equate “we implemented Wong MHL” with “Moffitt is our partner.”
Next meetings (priority)¶
- AdventHealth Winter Haven / Orlando TRI — clinical access, Polk equity narrative.
- UF BioCore — HPC allocation + FCIF eligibility.
- Sylvester epigenetics / Precision Medicine — cfDNA + pangenome scientific home.
One of UF or Sylvester replaces Moffitt as named lead on the external brief.