Breaking Through: The INBRE Effect

A Letter from the President

Growing from a Firm Foundation

Hermann Haller, M.D.

It’s summer on Salisbury Cove, and the MDI Bio Lab campus is at its busiest. Our summer fellows have flooded the laboratories and the lawns, adding youthful enthusiasm to our scientific enterprise.

But this year our ranks swelled even farther by a wave of new graduate students from the U.S. and abroad. They are providing an extra jolt of energy to life here — a year-round research workforce fueling the next phase of discovery.

Optimizing Our Potential

MDI Bio Lab is on the move, and growing our research training programs is an essential element of our new strategic vision. We want to bring the number of research groups here up to 15 and support them with the resources necessary to keep them at the cutting edge of biomedical science.

That’s why our century-old campus continues to see substantial renovations and improvements, including a new modular home to provide suite-style living for graduate students. We are still bursting at our seams, but we are confident that by the end of the decade, we will reach the ideal size for a small but mighty research institute.

Elevating the Next Generation

Our scientific goals are nothing less than to radically improve human health and ease the struggles of aging. But our dual mission includes a passionate commitment to tomorrow’s scientists, a commitment validated this year when the National Institutes of Health chose MDI Bio Lab once again to lead and expand the Maine IDeA Network of Biomedical Research Excellence (INBRE).

The Maine INBRE is a statewide research and training network that for 23 consecutive years has quietly spurred Maine’s biomedical economy forward. I invite you to read all about that and much more in this edition of Breaking Through.

With appreciation and gratitude,

Hermann Haller, M.D.
President

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