Mighty mouse

Mice, lots of them, are coming to Westchester County under tight controls next year. Occupying 50,000 square feet of indoor space in up to 40,000 cages, the rodent colony could herald the emergence of a new biotech center in Yonkers.

There, a metropolitan academic research consortium will team with a Hudson Valley company that is one of the world”™s leading breeders of lab-quality rodents to open a “mouse house” for biomedical research. Its developers expect it will draw more biotech companies and research institutions to Yonkers”™ revitalized industrial spaces.

At I-park N-Valley, a 116,000-square-foot technology center in a former pharmaceutical factory at 470 Nepperhan Ave., Academic Medicine Development Company (AMDeC) will open a $10 million shared-use mouse facility by winter or spring 2009. AmDeC officers last week announced their choice of Taconic Farms, an international breeder of rats and mice for in vivo research, with corporate offices in Hudson and the world”™s largest mouse- and rat-breeding facility in Germantown, both in Columbia County, to manage the shared facility.

Among top researchers and institutions, “There”™s a very big comfort level” with Taconic Farms and its expertise, Dr. Maria K. Mitchell, president of AMDeC, said last week from her company”™s Manhattan office.

Founded in 1952, the family-owned Taconic Farms operates 10 breeding facilities and service laboratories in the U.S., Denmark and Germany. In November, the company bought an 80 percent stake in Artemis Pharmaceuticals GmbH, a leader in mouse and rat genetics and genomics technology based in Cologne, Germany. The privately held Taconic Farms has 960 employees and annual revenues conservatively estimated in excess of $100 million, said company President Todd Little. Little said the Hudson Valley company is the world”™s third leading commercial provider of rat and mouse models for the study of human diseases.

The shared operation in Yonkers is said to be the first of its kind in the country. “In the past, there wasn”™t an enormous amount of collaboration among institutions” doing such research, Mitchell said. “New York doesn”™t have a long history of collaboration.” The Yonkers center, launched with a $7 million state appropriation, sends a message to research scientists and companies that that has changed, she said.

Mitchell said AMDeC hopes to secure a $1.5 million federal economic development grant and an additional $1.5 million from the state to complete financing for the project. Located in a state Empire Zone and federal Empowerment Zone, the site”™s tenant will be eligible for various tax credits and employment incentives.

Founded 11 years ago, AMDeC is a nonprofit consortium of 28 of the state”™s medical schools, academic health centers and major medical research institutions. Its mission is both to educate the public about biomedical research and to raise funds, advocate for and help develop more collaborative research projects and state-of-the-art research facilities to establish “a world-