The Jackson Laboratory is receiving a $10 million grant from the National Institutes of Health, which will fund a new Center for Precision Genetics. The idea is to use things like a person's genes to treat an illness.
"One of the challenges of precision medicine in humans is that if every disease is unique, then how do you test and prove that something works?" said Edison Liu, President and CEO of The Jackson Laboratory.
For example, Liu said, take a disease like congenital epilepsy. Genetic mutations predispose one to disabling seizures, but it can be difficult to test lots of therapeutic drugs on one patient. So, he said Jackson will use the NIH money to create model systems for diseases, replicating different mutant gene effects to test panels of drugs quicker and, hopefully, find treatments that work.
Jackson is headquartered in Bar Harbor, Maine, but received about $300 million in state tax payer money to help fund a new facility that opened in Farmington in late 2014.
Some of this NIH money will fund research there because, "the world of genetics is now moved into the cloud," said Liu.
"Not only do we sequence these mutations, but we also do the analysis on a computational basis," Liu said. "Much of our expertise in genomics and informatics is actually resident in JAX Genomic Medicine in Connecticut. Now, in all fairness, the majority of the work will be done in Bar Harbor, but it will be done in conjunction with our colleagues in Connecticut as well."
Jackson currently employs more than 1,700 people and, as of late July, 181 work in Connecticut.
