JAX pioneered mice as a research tool, invested $160 million in Ellsworth site
Photo / Courtesy Jackson Laboratory
In this 1950s photo, Jackson Laboratory scientist Margaret Dickie works in the lab’s mouse room. Dickie discovered the obesity mutation in mice in 1951.
Photo / Laurie Schreiber
Jackson Laboratory’s latest facility opened in Ellsworth in 2018.
Photo / Courtesy Jackson Laboratory
An aerial view of Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor.
In the early 1900s, Clarence Cook Little was a student at Harvard studying mammalian genetics when he became interested in a professor’s work on inheritance related to tumors in mice.
Little went on to pioneer the idea to inbreed mouse strains in order to create uniform sets of genetic traits, which would make the mice ideal research subjects for cancer and other diseases, according to a 1975 biography by George D. Snell. In 1929, Little founded the Roscoe B. Jackson Memorial Laboratory, named after a patron, in Bar Harbor.
Today, the lab is a center for understanding the genetic basis of human disease, using the mouse as an experimental model. The lab also breeds and distributes thousands of strains of mice to 1,900 institutions in 75 countries. The lab has additional facilities in Sacramento, Calif., and Farmington, Conn. In 2018, it opened the 134,900-square-foot Charles E. Hewett Center in Ellsworth, a state-of-the-art “vivarium,” or mouse production facility, at a cost of nearly $160 million.
The mouse’s role in genetic research is considered key to solving critical problems of human health and to identify and test better treatments.
With the advent of the pandemic, the lab’s capabilities were highlighted when it undertook an unprecedented scale-up of a unique transgenic mouse model, or a “humanized” mouse, to help scientists around the world develop vaccines and treatments for COVID-19.
JAX initiated a large-scale in vitro fertilization program that far extended its capacity to generate the mice, compared with natural mating. The lab generated a new colony of mice that are susceptible to COVID-19 and even honed in on the effects of the virus on specific human conditions, such as diabetes, by breeding mouse models with the same conditions.
“This is an extraordinarily complicated and sophisticated way of turning a mouse into as close to human patients as we can get,” said the lab’s scientific director, Nadia Rosenthal.
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