BAR HARBOR – JAX Research Systems will announce a major expansion in February and could enter the Bangor area or southern Maine within the next five years as the demand for research mice continues to climb, JAX president Warren Cook said during a recent interview.

The nonprofit mouse-breeding division of The Jackson Laboratory also will continue looking outside Maine for future expansion sites to improve customer service and lower costs by getting closer to its customers, Cook said.

He declined to give any hints about the February announcement, but made it clear that JAX is looking for partners as it makes plans for the future.

“I can see [expansion] happening in Bangor or southern Maine,” Cook said. “If we find something that’s big enough or located with a partner, we would certainly consider that.”

JAX already has partnered with the University of California at Davis, creating a new entity, JAX West, to breed mice for customers in the western United States.

In addition to creating 50 jobs – and counting – the collaboration will reduce operational costs for both JAX and UC Davis, while inspiring team research opportunities between scientists in Maine and California and creating new graduate-student training programs at UC Davis.

Cook said that while the JAX headquarters in Bar Harbor will continue to see growth in the coming years, the company eventually will be forced to move closer to population centers in Maine and other states in order to find workers and cut transportation costs to major markets.

JAX, in partnership with the scientific research part of the lab, has opened training facilities in Cherryfield and Fairfield to recruit new animal care attendants and other workers for new jobs being created in Bar Harbor.

But Cook said it would make sense to open breeding operations in the future closer to where those trained workers live.

“So I think job opportunities for [Bar Harbor] will continue, but we will also continue to look both inside and outside of Maine” for future expansions.

The Jackson Lab recently leased a 30,000-square-foot building on Route 3 in Trenton to use as a multipurpose facility, including more mouse production. It should be operational sometime in the new year, lab officials have said, and will include some customer service employees as well as animal handlers.

The Bar Harbor lab also is in the throes of a five-year expansion project at its home campus, where a work force of 1,200 – the largest in Hancock County – is divided between the research division and mouse production. An estimated 100 new jobs have been added to the lab annually over the past several years, and that growth will continue for the foreseeable future.

In 2001 Cook’s division sold 1.9 million mice to 12,000 laboratories around the world, with all profits going to scientific research, he said. The JAX inventory features 3,500 different strains of mice, including 2,500 that are available for sale to scientists in 56 countries.

The Jackson Laboratory, a designated national cancer research center, was founded in 1929, although mouse production didn’t begin until 1933. Although long recognized by science as a premier research animal, demand for mice has exploded in the past decade with creation of technology that allows researchers to genetically engineer mice to have certain diseases.

Cook predicted that both JAX and Jackson Lab would continue to grow, but as part of a statewide biomedical research coalition that found its first big success in passage of a $5.5 million state bond issue last November to fund research.

“We will grow with the coalition rather than individually,” Cook said. “It is significant that taxpayers have decided to invest in the industry. That’s a major accomplishment. And it’s good for us financially, but it also gives us an opportunity to partner and to be [an economic] player not only in Bar Harbor but other places in the state as we grow.”

The biomedical community must repay the bond debt to taxpayers by providing good jobs and working with other Maine organizations to maximize the investment, Cook said.

“You can’t just take,” he said.

Cook said Maine’s biomedical industry will likely build new scientific programs that will allow collaboration with different entities, such as the University of Maine System. He said the industry should not, however, try to stretch itself from one end of Maine to the other, but rather “concentrate our money in two or three cluster operations” involving multiple partners.