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Nobel Prize contender Lee heads Jackson Lab’s Farmington debut

It’s been quite a year for Charles Lee, scientific director of the Jackson Laboratory for Genomic Medicine.

For one, Jax’s new 183,500-square-foot research facility at the UConn Health Center opened in October, consolidating a research team that had been spread across the Farmington campus in temporary labs.

As if that weren’t excitement enough, Lee was thought to be a contender for the 2014 Nobel Prize in physiology/medicine.

The Nobel announcement came Oct. 6, just one and two days, respectively, before Jax’s grand opening and first symposium.

Though Lee didn’t win the Nobel Prize, he said he was honored to be considered a finalist, but he was far more nervous about the symposium going well.

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The group of speakers included three Nobel Prize-winning geneticists who spoke to a capacity crowd of 370 people. Lee, a former Harvard geneticist, said it’s rare to see so many Nobel Laureates in one place, and he felt it showed the broader scientific community’s respect for Jax and Connecticut’s fledgling bioscience industry.

Grand opening and Nobel talk aside, when Lee reflects on the past year, he is most excited about the science happening at Jax, which now has 154 employees.

Jax microbiome researcher George Weinstock is working with Connecticut Children’s Medical Center to collect stool samples in an effort to more accurately predict what sorts of bacteria cause infections in newborns.

Meanwhile, immunology researcher Jaques Banchereau recently won a grant from the state’s Bioscience Innovation Fund with a fellow scientist at Yale to develop new mouse DNA strains for studying human disease.

And Jax’s Farmington facility received a $7.5 million grant from Seoul National University — where Lee is a part-time professor — to expand its mouse cancer avatar project. The program, which falls under the umbrella of personalized medicine, sequences patients’ tumors before implanting them in mice to study how the tumors react to various types of treatment. Korean researchers will pipe their data to Jax, allowing the nonprofit to build its growing database of tumor data both for its own research and to license to others.

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More international partnerships could be in the works, Lee said.

“We are keeping our eyes open,” Lee said. “It’s a constant struggle making sure we don’t bite off more than we can chew. We have a lot going on as it is.”

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