Cleveland Clinic has officially opened two new research buildings near East 100th Street and Cedar Avenue, a $400 million investment that adds roughly 300,000 square feet of laboratory space to its Main Campus footprint. The twin facilities, connected by a skyway bridge over East 100th Street, bring nearly 30 labs and more than 700 employees under one expanded research umbrella.
According to Crain's Cleveland Business, the newly opened complex splits its space between a 170,000-square-foot northeast building and a 120,000-square-foot northwest building. The northeast structure houses the Sheikha Fatima bint Mubarak Global Center for Pathogen & Human Health Research, while the northwest building is dedicated to specialty research and core support services, according to Cleveland Clinic.
The pathogen center's name traces back to a 2023 gift from the United Arab Emirates honoring H.H. Sheikha Fatima bint Mubarak, made to advance infectious disease, virology, and cancer immunotherapy research, per the same account. That gift also supports research facilities in Florida and an endowed chair, underscoring the international reach behind what is now a Main Campus centerpiece.
A Skyway, a Labor Deal, and 400 Construction Jobs
Construction on the two buildings began in February 2023 under a Project Labor Agreement with the Cleveland Building and Construction Trades Council, an arrangement that generated approximately 400 jobs for local building trades members, according to NEOtrans. The project's final steel beam, forming the East 100th Street skyway connecting the two buildings, was hoisted during a topping-off ceremony in August 2025.
The new labs don't operate in isolation. Cleveland Clinic unveiled the IBM Quantum System One at its Lerner Research Institute back in March 2023, making it the nation's first private-sector, on-premises quantum computer dedicated to healthcare research under a 10-year Discovery Accelerator partnership, per Cleveland Clinic's newsroom. The system's processor was upgraded in late 2025 to support supercomputing research, giving the new laboratory space a computational partner already running on campus.
The Research Buildings Anchor a Bigger Regional Bet
The research complex serves as the primary anchor of the $500 million Cleveland Innovation District, a public-private initiative launched in January 2021 by the State of Ohio, JobsOhio, Cleveland Clinic, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland State University, MetroHealth, and University Hospitals. Under that model, participating institutions are tasked with generating 20,000 direct and indirect jobs and contributing $3 billion to the Northeast Ohio regional economy by 2030, according to the State of Ohio.
Interim 2024 state reports showed partners had already created over 2,600 jobs and spent nearly $1.2 billion on research toward those 2030 targets. It's a benchmark worth watching as the newly opened labs begin actual scientific output rather than construction milestones.
What's Next: A Billion-Dollar Neuro Building and More
The research buildings are just one piece of a broader, multi-billion-dollar physical transformation underway across Cleveland Clinic's footprint. The health system's next major Main Campus milestone is a $1.1 billion, 1 million-square-foot Neurological Institute on Carnegie Avenue, with construction slated to finish by the end of 2026 and patient care beginning in early 2027, per WKYC Channel 3. That facility is designed to consolidate inpatient and outpatient neurological services that had previously been scattered across campus.
Cleveland Clinic's ambitions extend well beyond University Circle. The health system broke ground in October 2024 on a $200 million, 210,000-square-foot Global Peak Performance Center on the downtown Cleveland riverfront in partnership with the Cleveland Cavaliers, targeted to open in 2027 — a project that anchors Bedrock Real Estate's broader riverfront master plan, as Hoodline previously reported on the site's robot guard dogs.
The system also announced plans this year for a $140 million, 600,000-square-foot Unified Operations Center at the former Ford stamping plant site in Walton Hills, meant to centralize administrative and supply chain logistics. That hub involves relocating and creating more than 500 jobs, a project Hoodline covered in depth when it rattled the small suburb.
The Financial Engine Behind the Building Boom
None of this construction happens without cash flow to match. Cleveland Clinic reported operating revenue of $18 billion and an operating margin exceeding 4% for fiscal year 2025, alongside nearly $500 million in efficiency savings, financial results Hoodline detailed in its coverage of the system's 2025 earnings.
That financial footing has fueled a broader building surge across Main Campus, including new parking garages in University Circle and land swaps to expand emergency and trauma care, both of which Hoodline has tracked as University Circle residents watch traffic and construction patterns shift. Local hospital construction has also drawn attention to workforce development efforts, including boot camp programs designed to bring minority-owned contractors into Cleveland's building boom.
For now, the opening of the research complex marks a shift from cranes and steel beams to lab benches and computational research — the first tangible output of a project years in the making, even as the next billion-dollar phase of Cleveland Clinic's expansion is already rising nearby.
