The Maine Medical Center Research Institute plans to double in size, announced MMCRI Director Dr. Ken Ault at a presentation to the Scarborough Town Council Wednesday evening. The expansion is part of the institute’s second, five-year strategic plan.

Wayne Clark, associate vice president of communications and marketing for MMC said it is a big step for MMCRI to double in size and the expected increase in research money will have a large impact on the state and region.

The institute is on the Maine Med Scarborough campus, just off Route 1. Its present building contains 55,000 square feet.

Ault said Maine attracts a large number of people in the biomedical field and the expansion will add extra incentive to bring talent to the area.

“We needed the critical mass,” said Ault. “Now we can show them a place to bring their practices.”

The plan calls for MMCRI to grow from the current 12 investigators to 25 investigators over the next five years, which would mean a doubling of the budget and a doubling of MMC’s investment in the research center. Ault said that each investigator has a 10-member support staff.

Clark said that as MMCRI recruits more investigators and applies for more grants it will be decided how and when they would need to physically expand the MMCRI building. But that’s two or three years down the line, said Clark.

The MMCRI’s first strategic plan was eight or nine years ago and it was that plan which led them to Scarborough three years ago. As part of that first strategic plan MMCRI received a federal designation as a Center of Biomedical Research Excellence, which brought grant funding of $10 million over five years.

The COBRE grant is designed to build infrastructure and bring in new talent. From that first grant they brought in nine new investigators, one of whom, Joe Verdi, has since landed an $11 million grant COBRE grant of his own.

The first grant is up for renewal, which will be one key aspect of the second strategic plan and their expansion.

Ault said that after a year of work on developing their second, five-year strategic plan there were two major conclusions drawn. The first was that, although MMCRI had grown significantly in the past five years, compared to other non-university research centers they had not grown enough. “Good ones are twice as big,” said Ault.

The second conclusion was that most growth should be in the field of clinical research, a shift from cardiovascular research, which has been the main focus so far. Ault said a large portion of that growth would be seen in Scarborough as well as the Bramhall Hill campus in Portland.

Ault said their strategic plan fits very well with the National Institutes of Health roadmap, which is shifting their funding from individual investigators working on individual projects to more regional research. As a part of that MMCRI has been asked to join the New England Regional Translation Research Center, which includes very prestigious institutions such as the University of Vermont, the University of Connecticut, Brown and Dartmouth.

“We think that will jump-start our own strategic plan and help us grow,” said Ault.

Clark also said the building of a $25 million, 55,000-square-foot outpatient surgical center on MMC’s Scarborough campus, which has been on the back burner for years now, will probably be the next big thing to happen, though he was unsure of the timeline for it.

Dr. Ken Ault, left, and Wayne Clark of Maine Medical Center discuss future plans for the Maine Medical Center Research Institute in Scarborough, of which Ault is the director.