$4.1 Million for JAX, MDI Biological Laboratory Secured by Senator Collins in Funding Bill in First Key Step
Washington, D.C.--U.S. Senator Susan Collins, a senior member of the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee, announced that she secured a total of $4,100,000 for The Jackson Laboratory and Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory in the draft Fiscal Year 2023 Labor, Health & Human Services, and Education bill. The bill, which was officially released by the full Senate Appropriations Committee today, must still be voted upon by the full Senate and House.
“The brilliant scientists at Jackson Lab and MDI Biological Lab are making great strides to better understand and treat diseases that affect nearly every American family,” said Senator Collins. “This funding would help to make improvements to their facilities and upgrade equipment that will allow both institutions to continue their groundbreaking research that is improving human health and longevity. As a senior member of the Appropriations Committee, I will continue to champion this funding as the appropriations process moves forward.”
$3.5 million would be used by Jackson Lab to design and construct a two-story facility that will be located on its Bar Harbor campus. The facility will be innovative and singular in design, operation, and research capability, creating a mouse research facility in Maine unlike any other in the world, with a goal of producing ”next generation” genomic solutions for human disease, using large-scale, longitudinal data, a nuanced set of phenotypes, and the most precise models of human health and disease available to the biomedical research community.
$600,000 would be used by the MDI Biological Laboratory to renovate an existing structure on its historic campus, creating a secure, state-of-the-art drug discovery facility that meets rigorous pharmaceutical industry and federal standards. The facility would support MDI Bioscience, a new initiative that leverages the lab’s ground-breaking research with fish and nematodes to evaluate novel drug compounds in early stages of development, helping the best therapies get more quickly to doctors and their patients.
