Crossposted from Nature’s news blog on behalf of Heidi Ledford

The Jackson Laboratory has ended its push to establish a $328 million personalized medicine research institute in Florida.

On 3 June, Jackson Lab announced that Florida was unable to fulfill the lab’s request for $100 million in state support to launch the institute. The decision brings to an end over a year of negotiations with state and county officials, and appears, for now, to be the death knell of the expansion project. “We’re not currently looking for other opportunities” in Florida or elsewhere, Jackson Lab spokesperson Joyce Peterson said.

State governments have been pouring funds into initiatives to stimulate the local biomedical industry, believing that the efforts will pay off in new jobs and local economic prosperity. (For more on that assumption, see ‘What science is really worth’.) Jackson Lab currently employs 1,400 people in its Bar Harbor, Maine headquarters and satellite labs in Sacramento, California. The lab provides research materials and services, and is perhaps best known for its extensive collection of laboratory mice with different genetic backgrounds.

Continue reading on Nature’s news blog. Or for more background on the story, see Nature Medicine’s past coverage: Sunshine biomedicine and Jackson Laboratory’s foray into Florida faces murky future.