Brent Batten: Jackson Lab a meeting of mice and men

Move over Mickey.

There’s a new mouse in town. Or at least there will be if Jackson Laboratory can secure the money it’s seeking to build a research facility in Florida.

Mickey’s been the state’s main mouse since 1971 when Walt Disney World opened in Orlando but the Jackson Lab brings with it not only a reputation for doing cutting edge genetic research but also one as the world’s foremost breeder of mice. Or, more accurately, it brings a reputation for doing cutting edge genetic research because it is the world’s foremost breeder of mice.

The Florida facility, planned for eastern Collier County providing the right combination of state, local and private funding can be found, would mainly use computers and not be as mouse-intensive as Jackson’s Bar Harbor, Maine, headquarters, but the work done here would build on nearly a century of experience with the rodent.

Jackson Lab founder C.C. Little in 1929 had a vision for researching the genetic aspects of cancer. At the time, the genetic study of mice had been underway for about 30 years. Little is credited with conceiving of and creating the first inbred strain of laboratory mice to unravel the genetics of cancer.

Today, Jackson Labs maintains about 5,000 different strains of inbred mice. They are used both for research in the lab and for sale to scientists around the world. Do you need an obese mouse with a strong immunity to pancreatic cancer? Jackson can hook you up. A diabetic mouse with lymphoma? Got it. Or, if they don’t, they’ll try to create it for you.

Last year Jackson sold, on a nonprofit basis, about 2.5 million mice to 16,000 labs in 53 countries, according to Joyce Peterson, communications manager for the laboratory. Sixteen Jackson Lab mice are in orbit right now, ferried to the International Space Station by Discovery for an experiment on the effects of space on the immune system.

At any given time there might be 750,000 mice at the Bar Harbor campus. For-profit labs also breed and sell mice but they tend to stock only a few dozen strains, those that are most popular, Peterson said.

“The 20,000 genes that make up humans and mice are pretty much the same,” said Rich Woychik, president of Jackson Labs. “Mice develop the same types of cancer humans develop. We can basically study these things with the mouse.”

Woychik said Florida has been very welcoming to bio-tech companies, an attitude that led Jackson to choose it over offers from places like Boston and Salt Lake City. The work of the Collier County Economic Development Council further steered the lab toward Southwest Florida. “There’s been tremendous enthusiasm in the state for major biomedical investment. Those investments are beginning to pay off,” Woychik said, adding of Collier County, “We really like your community.”

These days, researchers can manipulate the genes of mice to get the combinations they want. “We can essentially swap out genes and exchange them at will,” Woychik said.

But for decades the work was more laborious. Identical mice would be bred, and researchers would look carefully for differences _ mutations _ in their offspring. That sort of work is still done, Peterson said. Mutants are separated and checked every two weeks as scientists look for traits that might make them useful in studying a particular disease. A heavy mouse might come in handy in the study of obesity or diabetes, for instance.