The Jackson Laboratory, which is based in Bar Harbor and has more than 1,700 employees in Hancock County, is expanding to metro Gainesville, Florida.
The biomedical research laboratory has been advertising and filling scientific jobs in research space it has leased at Momentum Labs in the city of Alachua, which is about half an hour northwest of Gainesville, where University of Florida is located. Momentum Labs is a research facility built by a private developer where other biotechnology firms have leased space.
An account affiliated with Jackson Lab, also known as JAX, posted job listings last summer on social media site X for sales director and preclinical technologist positions. Multiple online job websites such as BuiltIn, Talent, Teal and Talentify have nearly identical descriptions for openings.
“We’re looking for new members to join our team @jacksonlab in Gainesville, FL,” the posts say. “Think you might be the right fit? Learn more.”
“We are growing!” says one listing at Talent.com “The Jackson Laboratory (JAX) has expanded capacity at a new state-of-the-art preclinical facility located at Momentum Labs in Gainesville, Florida.”
Jackson Lab officials on Thursday confirmed that they are leasing research space and filling scientific jobs near Gainesville. The objective is to expand the lab’s pre-clinical services, in which it develops and tests potential new products or treatments for patients.
“Our Gainesville facility will increase our capacity to provide an array of translationally relevant pre-clinical services to assess the pharmacokinetics, safety, and efficacy of experimental treatments for oncology, autoimmunity, neurological and rare disease,” lab officials said. “JAX has already hired more than 30 employees at the Gainesville site and is expecting a total of about 65.”
The expansion to Alachua is not the first time Jackson Lab has shown an interest in conducting some of its research in Florida.
In 2009, the lab announced plans to expand to Collier County, Florida, to build an institute for personalized medicine, but two years later it shifted those plans to Sarasota after Collier County officials faced pushback from the public for offering to help fund the project.
Those Florida expansion plans became an issue of debate in Maine’s 2010 gubernatorial election, with some candidates insisting the lab should build the institute in Maine. Lab supporters, however, argued at the time that Maine doesn’t have the financial resources to compete against a more populous state such as Florida, and that any expansion by the lab — whether in Maine or anywhere else — would pay dividends in Maine over the long term.
Jackson Lab later withdrew its Sarasota plans after it concluded Florida was not able to offer enough public funding to bring the project to fruition. In September 2011, the lab agreed on a partnership with University of Connecticut to build a personalized medicine research facility in Farmington, Connecticut, where it currently has several hundred more employees.
The Florida expansion comes as Jackson Lab also plans to grow its Bar Harbor campus.
The lab is in the early stages of preparing to construct a two-floor, 20,000-square-foot addition onto its main Bar Harbor building that will house the group’s Rare Disease Translational Center.
Jackson Lab already has roughly 40 people assigned to the rare disease research unit, but they are spread out on the sprawling 62-acre campus. The $24 million addition is expected to house those 40 employees and another 95 that will be hired in Bar Harbor.
Overall, Jackson Lab currently has roughly 1,450 employees in Bar Harbor and 250 in Ellsworth, 10 in Augusta, and four in Portland. Aside from those already hired in Florida, the lab has more than 1,300 additional employees in Connecticut, California, China and Japan, totaling roughly 3,000 worldwide.
