The Texas Veterinary Medical Diagnostic Laboratory expanded and renovated its 19,500-sf laboratory in Amarillo to add a BSL-3 suite, the state's second such laboratory dedicated to animal disease diagnosis. The lab is designed to function primarily as a BSL-2, but contains built-in features and SOPs that allow it to convert to BSL-3 in the event of a suspected outbreak of a highly contagious animal and/or zoonotic disease.
Spurred into action by a broken autoclave, Rush University Medical Center gutted and rebuilt its 30-plus-year-old BSL-3 lab and its anteroom, while converting existing adjacent offices into a dedicated mechanical room. The primary goals with the renovation were to bring the lab up to contemporary BSL-3 standards and to isolate its infrastructure and utilities from the rest of the Jelke Building, a mixed-use lab and patient-care building.
The Gates Vascular Institute (GVI) transforms the concept of translational collaboration, uniting not only a private health entity with a public institution, but also patients, physicians, researchers, educators, industry, and government within a state-of-the-art vertical campus. The building brings together, through a unique public/private partnership, the heart, vascular, and emergency facilities of Kaleida Health; the Clinical Translational Research Center (CTRC) of the University at Buffalo (UB); and a biosciences incubator and The Jacobs Institute of Neurology, both UB affiliates.
New technologies and approaches are making the renovation of academic science facilities a more financially attractive option for institutions facing limited budgets, constrained real estate, and aging buildings with prominent historic legacies. Recent data suggests that, depending on the type of technology applied, institutions can achieve significant savings by renovating existing buildings to meet the needs of modern science as opposed to demolishing and building new.
The six-story Academic Health Sciences Centre embraces multidisciplinary, highly technical research, while supporting Saskatchewan's commitment to provide exceptional healthcare for the people of the province. Flad Architects collaborated with Henry Downing Howlett Architects to design the new D Wing, which houses research labs, animal facilities, and academic offices for biomedical and pharmaceutical researchers from the various Health Sciences Colleges and units at the University of Saskatchewan.
The Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research is a pioneering research facility that brings together biologists working to understand the disease at a molecular level and engineering faculty devoted to solving problems related to cancer. The ultimate goal is to accelerate the discovery of cures for cancer.
Driven by a spirit of collaboration, Kaleida Health and the University at Buffalo united within a single structure to bring several disciplines—and patients, surgeons, and researchers—together to exchange knowledge and ignite innovation. The 476,000-sf facility achieves this by stacking a translational research building over a clinical vascular institute. The first floors of this 10-story "vertical campus" house the Gates Vascular Institute (GVI), with the Clinical and Translational Research Center (CTRC) occupying the top half of the building.
The Blood Research Institute, with eight core laboratories serving 21 investigator-level scientists, is a state-of-the-art research facility located on the campus of the Milwaukee Regional Medical Center, along with the Medical College of Wisconsin, Froedtert Hospital, and Children's Hospital of Wisconsin.
The Translational and Biomedical Research Center for the Medical College of Wisconsin (MCW) and the Children's Research Institute (CRI) provide a technically sophisticated facility that supports a broad range of research projects and protocols. The contemporary design enables MCW to expand its research environment, recruit researchers, and secure additional grant money. In addition, the lab building elevates CRI's national leadership profile in pediatric healthcare as it recruits top talent and conducts treatment and diagnostic research.
Recent high-profile natural disasters and human-based incidents are driving vivarium facility owners to reevaluate their disaster and contingency plans. Traditional approaches to risk assessment and research preservation are often over-simplified, understaffed, and insufficiently funded. A new shift in thinking focuses on preparing for the net results of losing utilities, an entire building, or access to a section of campus rather than the initial causes.
Although relatively small in size compared to more established research institutions, the University of New England (UNE) is making tremendous strides in growing its research and scholarship programs and infrastructure despite a shrinking pool of available grant funding. The private university, founded in 1978, began focusing its expansion efforts on biomedical research only within the past decade.
Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) has renovated 4,000 sf of research space to consolidate its aquaculture facilities in the Eugene Braunwald Research Center, where the environmental temperature, humidity, and lighting are regulated to sustain a successful zebrafish colony. Fixed equipment includes 96 racks capable of sustaining up to 6,600 tanks; two dedicated reverse osmosis water supply systems; and new pump and filtration systems on multiple independent circuits, with separate large-scale breeding chambers and an isolated quarantine area.
Tradeline asked 120 individuals representing 98 research organizations to prioritize their areas of focus for 2013 and to make open-ended comments regarding those priorities. The priorities identified in this survey will be the focus of Tradeline's upcoming conference: The 2013 International Conference on Biocontainment Facilities on March 18-19, 2013, in San Diego.
The respondents’ overall priorities are:
1. Pressure and airflow control
2. Maintenance/operations requirements and processes
3. People, teams, and competency
When the Institute for Animal Health in Pirbright, U.K., launched a significant upgrade of aging infrastructure to improve health- and safety-related systems at its high-level containment facilities, project leaders undertook a benchmarking process to determine how much the upgrades would cost to operate and how Pirbright's organizational structure compared with similar facilities in preparing to meet long-range goals.
Imagine a state-of-the-art biomedical research facility where some of the brightest scientific minds in the world interact on a daily basis, with each other and with creative thinkers from other fields; where science is conducted not in an isolated lab but in a collaborative and fluid way, encouraging discoveries benefiting all aspects of society.
