Ellison Medical Foundation Makes Two Gifts Totaling $1,675,000 to The Jackson Laboratory

Date: February 2, 2004

$945,000 to Fund Cryopreservation Efforts, $750,000 for Genetic Repository

Bar Harbor, Maine - In two gifts that, together, will significantly increase the availability of genetic resources to the world's biomedical research community, the Ellison Medical Foundation of Bethesda, Md., has awarded The Jackson Laboratory a total of $1,675,000.

The independent, nonprofit Jackson Laboratory is best known as the world's largest mammalian genetics research institution, with 37 research groups studying every major human disease and developing new biomedical technologies and information systems.

But the Laboratory has another, unique role: breeding and distributing genetically defined laboratory mice to biomedical research laboratories around the world. Today the Laboratory is home to more than 2,800 strains (varieties) of mice, many serving as a model for one or more human diseases and disorders.

The vast majority of these mouse strains are vital to research, yet are only required in small numbers. And as new technologies enable the development of many new mouse models-such as the numerous models for neurological diseases and heart, lung, blood and sleep disorders emerging from resource centers at The Jackson Laboratory-the issue of mouse room space and breeding costs becomes critical. The Ellison grants address these issues.

The first gift, of $750,000, will fund construction of a Repository Center to consolidate all the low-demand mouse colonies into a single breeding facility, a project that will help the Laboratory deliver these valuable mice more quickly, efficiently and economically to the researchers who need them.

Yet, according to Richard Sprott, Ph.D., executive director of the Ellison Medical Foundation, this project is just the first step in streamlining the mouse-to-laboratory pipeline. "Cryopreservation is where the real efficiency is," Dr. Sprott notes.

Since 1972, researchers at The Jackson Laboratory have successfully frozen 8-cell mouse embryos in a process known as cryopreservation. Today the Laboratory is recognized as a world leader in this field, having frozen more than 2 million embryos from more than 3,000 strains, as well as frozen ovaries and sperm.

The second Ellison Medical Foundation grant provides $945,000 to fund additional research in cryopreservation techniques, as well as a program to educate the scientific community outside the Laboratory in use of cryopreserved embryos.

Each year The Jackson Laboratory offers several courses on cryopreservation and other reproductive techniques to scientists from around the world. The Ellison grant will increase these training efforts with the goal of moving the biomedical research community to order cryopreserved strains, rather than live mice.

Jackson Laboratory Director Rick Woychik, Ph.D., explains, "While it costs about $3,000 a year to maintain a single strain of mice, we can keep that strain frozen for just pennies a year, until a researcher needs it. We at The Jackson Laboratory have the expertise to recover strains in this way, and then send the mice to the researcher, but it would be much more efficient if we could ship frozen embryos directly to the researchers and have them build their mouse colonies at their own institutions."

Dr. Woychik adds, "These generous gifts demonstrate the Ellison Medical Foundation's outstanding leadership and vision. They will help not only The Jackson Laboratory but the whole world's biomedical research community in the quest to discover the genetic basis for human diseases and disorders."

The Ellison Medical Foundation, established and supported by Lawrence J. Ellison, primarily supports basic research in aging and global infectious disease. The foundation particularly wishes to stimulate new creative research that might not be funded by traditional sources or that is often under-funded in the U.S. The Ellison Medical Foundation fosters research by means of grants-in-aid to investigators at universities and laboratories within the United States using a variety of award mechanisms including a New Scholars Program, Senior Scholars Program, Conferences and Workshops Awards Program, a Training Program, and an Infrastructure Awards Program.

With more than 1,300 employees and an FY04 operating budget of $127 million, the 75-year-old Jackson Laboratory is one of Maine's largest employers. Its research staff of more than 350 investigates the genetic basis of cancers, heart disease, osteoporosis, Alzheimer's disease, glaucoma, diabetes and many other human diseases and disorders. The Laboratory is also home of the Mouse Genome Database and many other publicly available information resources, and is also an international hub for scientific courses, conferences, training and education-including programs for Maine high school, college and graduate students.

Contact(s): Joyce Peterson or Jade Harmer, 207-288-6051

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