Buffet of specialized lab mice available

BAR HARBOR, Maine — When it comes to the price of mice, you pay more for defects.

A mouse with arthritis runs close to $200; two pairs of epileptic mice can cost 10 times that. You want three blind mice? That'll run you about $250. And for your own custom mouse, with the genetic modification of your choosing, expect to pay as much as $100,000.

Always a mainstay of scientific research, mice have become a critical tool in the quest for new drugs and medical treatments.

It turns out that a mouse's genes are so similar to a person's that with proper manipulation — either by man or nature — they can produce an animal with an ailment akin to virtually any human medical condition. Mice with Alzheimer's disease, obesity, diabetes, cancer and countless other ailments are being used to study both the illnesses themselves and potential treatments.

As many as 25 million mice are now used in experiments each year. Where do they come from?

From the mouse industry, of course.

There are many vendors: The Jackson Laboratory, a nonprofit supplier in Bar Harbor, Maine, ships more than 2 million a year. Commercial breeder Charles River Laboratories of Wilmington, Mass., makes about $500 million annually selling and caring for lab animals, most of them mice.

Yet the mouse business is a challenging one. What was once a relatively simple business of breeding and shipping animals has become an extremely challenging enterprise that requires cutting-edge technology and a mastery of difficult logistics.

"It's not just putting two animals together any more," said Terry Fisher, general manager for business development and surgical services at Charles River Laboratories, a Wilmington, Mass., which offers laboratory animals and services to pharmaceutical companies and researchers.

At the Jackson Laboratory, Rob Taft maintains a collection of 2,850 different mouse strains — but he rarely sets eyes on most of them.

Two-thirds of Taft's collection consists of embryos, frozen at 320 degrees below zero in tiny glass tubes about the size of a cocktail straw. The half-dozen freezers that hold the embryos are a biological Library of Congress, a genetic repository containing virtually every publicly available strain of lab mouse ever produced.

All of them are for sale.