🔒JAX Labs uses biomolecular modeling to advance patient health

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In the fall of 2014, The Jackson Laboratory – a biomedical research organization founded in Bar Harbor in 1929 – opened the doors of the JAX Laboratory for Genomic Medicine, a 183,500-square-foot facility on the campus of the University of Connecticut Health Center.

The mission was to collaborate with local healthcare organizations, universities and biomedical startups, to jump-start the application of its mammalian genetics and mouse-breeding expertise to the treatment of patients with serious medical conditions.

Because mice are biologically similar to humans, have genetic susceptibilities to the same diseases, and can be genetically manipulated to mimic most human diseases and conditions, mice have been used for more than a century to better understand the causes – and potential cures – for everything from glaucoma, bacterial infections and polio to Alzheimer’s disease and cancer.

The Maine-based Jackson Laboratory pioneered the use of mice in disease research, was for many years the “undisputed world leader” in breeding mice for this purpose, has won global acclaim for its contributions to the field, and today provides mouse models and services to more than 20,000 laboratories across the world.

But while all of this has greatly benefited the biomedical community and led to significant medical advances, the company felt that becoming more directly involved in improving human health could broaden the impact of its research on patients, said Miguel Ilzarbe, director of operations and administration for JAX Genomic Medicine.

It found the ideal home for its new facility in Farmington, and five years later, JAX is engaged in a variety of Connecticut-based partnerships that are fundamentally changing the way patient diseases are treated.

Just one example is a project being carried out in conjunction with Connecticut Children’s Medical Center, in which tumors taken from pediatric patients are “xenografted” onto mice. Researchers then treat the mouse with various drugs to determine which is the most effective.

In the past, Ilzarbe said, researchers and clinicians thought of cancer as just organ-specific – a patient had breast cancer or liver cancer, for example. “What we’re finding is that each person is different in their genome and each of these cancers is caused by different types of environmental factors or familial history. There are many more mutations that can cause a type of cancer than we had originally anticipated. So a patient doesn’t just have breast cancer. She has a particular type of breast cancer.”

Whereas 15 years ago, most cancer patients would receive chemotherapy, tumor samples can now be characterized at a molecular level at JAX’s CLIA-certified diagnostic lab and compared with known mutations. The patient is then treated with the drugs that have been shown to be most effective against that exact type of cancer. “That is a huge quality of life [issue] for someone who may not need to undergo chemotherapy but could use a specific type of drug,” Ilzarbe said.

“We have also partnered with some veterinarians across Connecticut to do the same kind of work for canine cancers – and then create a canine cancer repository.” In that project, dog cancers are transferred to mice and are then compared with human cancers, to see where there are similarities and differences. This research will benefit both dogs and humans.

Ilzarbe said people commonly confuse genetics and genomics but they are not the same.

In genomics – the study of the entirety of an organism’s genes, called the genome – researchers use high-level mathematics and computing known as bioinformatics to “analyze enormous amounts of DNA-sequence data to find variations that affect health, disease or drug response,” according to JAX’s website.

Genetics, by contrast, “involves the study of specific and limited numbers of genes, or parts of genes, that have a known function. In biomedical research, scientists try to understand how genes guide the body’s development, cause disease, or affect response to drugs.”

JAX has expertise in both genetics and genomics, and its work has led to advances in personalized medicine: treatment optimized for an individual’s personal biological makeup. This type of approach is being used not only for cancer but for a variety of diseases and conditions – including diabetes – and treatments once thought to be futuristic are becoming mainstream.

“If you looked back 20 years, some of the stuff that we’re doing now would have been considered science fiction; the [biomedical] field and JAX have definitely taken some of the ‘fiction’ out of it,” Ilzarbe said.

“We really think that our future is using model systems to help prevent and treat human disease.”

The lab’s strategic location has given JAX opportunities to work closely with UConn’s medical school faculty and UConn Health clinicians, as well as with medical and dental graduate students who have been working on their PhD theses at Jackson Labs. “We’re now exploring with UConn Storrs how to have students from the computer science and engineering department, and the molecular and cell biology department, be assigned to the JAX faculty as well,” Ilzarbe said.

JAX is also benefiting from its ability to draw on the talent base in Connecticut, Massachusetts and New York, and to work with several world-class institutions in the region. It was recently awarded an $11 million grant for a project that includes collaborators from Yale, Hartford Hospital, and a biotech startup called Azitra, co-founded by a JAX faculty member, Julia Oh.

State incentives that originally helped bring JAX to Connecticut included $99 million in grants and $192 million in secured, forgivable loans – in exchange for a promise that the company would employ at least 300 people, 30% of them with salaries at or above 125% of the state’s average wage, within a decade. JAX exceeded that hiring target within four years, and thousands of additional jobs were created across the state as a result of the deal. Setting up shop in Connecticut, Ilzarbe said, “was a win-win for everyone.”

Today, JAX Genomic Medicine’s state-of-the-art building is home base for about 420 people, including 390 full-time employees and 30 students and trainees. The structure was “phase one” of the initial plan, with a research wing slated for later, Ilzarbe noted. “But we’ve expanded so quickly that we are actually leasing space from UConn now because our building is completely full. We’re still recruiting faculty members, so we envision continued growth.”