WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, U.S. Senators Susan Collins (R-Maine), the founder and co-chair of the Congressional Task Force on Alzheimer’s disease, and Angus King (I-Maine) announced that The Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor has been awarded $873,647 for the year to study the progression and genetic causes of Alzheimer’s. The award is a part of a five-year allocation that will ultimately amount to $4,191,258 by 2023. The funds were awarded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ (DHHS) National Institute on Aging.

“Tens of thousands of Mainers live with Alzheimer’s disease or care for those who do, and as our state’s population ages, that number will continue to rise,” Senators Collins and King said in a joint statement. “The important work being done at The Jackson Laboratory is part of a worldwide effort to end this disease, and we welcome this continued funding to help understand, treat, and one day cure Alzheimer’s.”

The Jackson Laboratory is an independent, nonprofit biomedical research institution based in Bar Harbor, Maine, with a National Cancer Institute-designated Cancer Center, a facility in Sacramento, Calif., and a genomic medicine institute in Farmington, Conn. It employs 1,900 staff, and its mission is to discover precise genomic solutions for disease and empower the global biomedical community in the shared quest to improve human health.

Last month, Senator Collins, a senior member of the Appropriations Committee, announced that the Senate Appropriations Committee approved a $425 million increase for Alzheimer’s research, the largest increase in history, which would bring total funding to $2.34 billion for Fiscal Year 2019.  This amount would surpass the benchmark $2 billion per year experts have said is needed to prevent and treat Alzheimer’s by the year 2025.