The Jackson Laboratory is preparing to construct a $24 million addition on its main building in Bar Harbor and expects to hire 95 more people to work in the new space.
The two-floor, 20,000 square-foot addition will house the medical research organization’s Rare Disease Translational Center and will be part of the lab’s Core Research Complex, according to documents filed with the town this past summer. Jackson Lab specializes in using mice to study human disease and illness, and it breeds specialty strains of the rodents that are used in biomedical research.
The project will mark another stage of growth for Jackson Lab, which was founded in Bar Harbor in 1929 and has become one of eastern Maine’s largest workplaces, with roughly 1,450 people in Bar Harbor and 250 in Ellsworth, according to a lab spokesperson. It also has approximately 10 workers in Augusta and 4 in Portland, and more than 1,300 outside Maine, in Connecticut, California, China and Japan.
The lab’s rare disease research unit is designed, through a collaborative approach, to study possible therapies that can be tailored to the needs of individual patients, rather than taking a “one-size-fits-all” approach. By expanding the unit, the lab hopes more patients will be able to receive quicker diagnoses and therapies, lab officials said.
The project is being funded with money previously approved by Mainers through a capital improvement bond and with $8 million in congressional funding that was approved earlier this year.
The expansion will not impact Bar Harbor’s property tax revenue, because the lab is a nonprofit organization that is exempt from having to pay taxes. But it does voluntarily give money directly to Bar Harbor — known as a payment in lieu of taxes — which this year is expected to be approximately $122,000, according to a lab spokesperson.
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 addition is expected to house those 40 employees and the other 95 that will be hired.
“Currently the RDTC program has outgrown [its] limited and dispersed footprint within the existing Research Animal Facility (RAF) on the Bar Harbor campus,” lab representatives wrote in documents submitted with its application to the town for approval. “The new building will provide dedicated laboratory and office space for the center.”
The town’s planning board approved the lab’s plans in August. Massachusetts-based Consigli Construction, which has been hired as the general contractor on the project, currently is soliciting bids from potential subcontractors.
The total budget for the project is $32 million, including the costs of design, permitting, construction, equipment, and other expenses, according to lab officials. The projected cost of construction alone is $24.5 million, they said.
