Jackson Lab opens Connecticut research center
Contributed / Marie Chao
The Jackson Laboratory for Genomic Medicine opened officially Tuesday afternoon in Farmington, Conn., during a dedication ceremony attended by senior officials from the Bar Harbor-based lab, Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy and top geneticists from Harvard University and the National Institutes of Health.
Plans for the $1.1 billion, nonprofit research center were announced in the fall of 2011 and include a focus on personalized medicine using genomics, Jackson Lab head Edison Liu told Mainebiz in a 2012 interview.
The new facility’s 183,000-square-foot building is at the University of Connecticut Health Center. It is funded in part by a $291 million Connecticut legislative act three years ago.
Dr. Eric Green, director of NIH’s National Human Genome Research Institute, told the more than 500 people at yesterday’s ceremony that he expects great genomic advances from the facility, according to the Hartford Courant.
The newspaper said Jackson Lab scientists and doctors at Hartford Hospital and Connecticut Children’s Medical Center will use specialized research mice in which a patient’s tumor tissue is inserted to replicate the tumor within the mice. The aim is to discover better treatments for human patients, but using the mice to test them instead of humans.
“Genomic medicine represents the next great frontier in the quest to improve human health,” Liu said in a prepared statement.
The Connecticut lab employs 150 full-time workers as of the end of September, 70 of whom are medical doctors or PhDs, according to Jackson Lab.
According to the laboratory, $14.2 million in total federal research grants have been awarded to date to its genomic medicine scientists.
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