MDIBL breaks ground on new eco-friendly laboratory building

The Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory broke ground today on a new building to house its expanding research program, including the Kathryn W. Davis Center for Regenerative Biology and Medicine.  The 10,000 square-foot facility is being funded in part by a $3.86 million grant awarded through the National Center for Research Resources, part of the National Institutes of Health.

Members of Maine’s Congressional delegation helped secure a $1.6 million appropriation from the Department of Defense earlier this year to support research to understand how organisms such as skates and zebrafish regenerate their limbs and organs, yet humans cannot. The Laboratory estimates that the expansion its regenerative research program will create 20-25 permanent jobs at MDIBL over the next five years.  In addition, 25 temporary jobs will be supported by the construction project over the next two years.

Congressman Mike Michaud said in a prepared statement, “The research being conducted at MDIBL is vital to the well-being of our troops and to all Americans. It offers the hope that by understanding how some organisms re-grow new organs and limbs after injury, we will soon develop new treatments to improve our own healing.  This project also creates the kind of high quality jobs that are critical to Maine’s future.”

“We are grateful for this opportunity to build a home for the Davis Center,” Dr. Kevin Strange, MDIBL Director, stated at the ground breaking.  “We are recruiting exciting new scientists to the Center, and this building will offer superb facilities for their important research.” 

The new building is being constructed as a wing on the larger laboratory building completed by MDIBL in 2008.  That building received gold LEED status from the U.S. Green Building Council for its environmentally friendly design and construction.  The new wing will be built with the same energy efficiencies, resulting in a facility that is 30 to 40 percent more efficient than standard construction.  The successful noise abatement strategies that were recently applied to the existing building will also be used on the new wing to protect the quiet rural character of the Lab’s surroundings. 

MDIBL has assembled the same team that designed and built the 2008 building to construct the new facility.  Nickerson and O’Day of Bangor will manage the construction, and WBRC Architects Engineers of Bangor designed the new wing.  Local firms will serve as subcontractors. MDIBL officials estimate that 85 to 90 percent of the total $4.5 million project will be spent locally in Hancock and Penobscot counties. 

The basement of the new building will house a state-of-the-art animal facility capable of supporting large colonies of zebrafish and other aquatic organisms.  Zebrafish are an important model organism for studying regeneration as they are able to grow new organs and fins as adults and can be genetically manipulated.  The newest scientist at the Davis Center, Dr. Voot Yin, studies limb and heart regeneration in zebrafish.  His colleague, Dr. Randall Dahn, studies limb regeneration in primitive vertebrates such as skates. 

The first and second floors of the building will provide laboratory and office space for up to four principal investigators and their lab groups, in addition to offering space for computational biology, microscopy, tissue culture, and a conference room that can double as a classroom.   

To make way for the new construction, the outdated Marshall Laboratory was torn down.  Built in 1972, Marshall housed the first year-round laboratory at MDIBL, where the late Dr. William Kinter conducted pioneering studies into the biological effects of crude oil and DDT.