New Vivarium to Expand Biomedical Research Capacity at Ohio University

Project Summary/Abstract Ohio University (OHIO) is an Institution of Emerging Excellence committed to conducting focused biomedical research. Through establishment and strengthening of two research institutes (the Diabetes Institute/DI and the Ohio Musculoskeletal and Neurological Institute/OMNI) over the past two decades, OHIO

has demonstrated a longstanding commitment to integrating clinical education, patient care, and research to help residents and trainees directly confront the local and global challenges of obesity, diabetes, pain, and aging in place. Recent strategic investments have strengthened the research environment within these

institutes and, consequently, bolstered the overall biomedical research portfolio of the entire university. In fact, these two institutes are responsible for over half of the university’s NIH funding portfolio and include a cadre of successful, multidisciplinary scientists conducting basic, clinical, and population health research. As a result of

recent expansions and funding successes in the DI and OMNI, there is now an urgent need to improve the outdated biomedical research facilities and infrastructure at OHIO. To that end, the institution has secured $67 million dollars (most of the funding required) for a new biomedical research facility, named the Heritage

Translational Research Center (HTRC). The HTRC will foster collaborative research among institute members by consolidating research currently fragmented across numerous buildings on campus and promote collaboration between basic and clinical scientists to bolster translational research. This new facility will also

move research efforts to spaces that are purpose-built for research and vacate aging buildings that are no longer appropriate for conducting modern biomedical sciences. This C06 project seeks to specifically fund the construction of a vivarium within the top floor of the HTRC to support the activities of the animal-based

researchers of DI and OMNI. The new vivarium will provide OHIO with a contemporary animal housing facility and replace an existing vivarium in an aged facility, expanding capacity (increasing total mouse cages by 64%), efficiency, and biosecurity as well as augment procedural and shared equipment space to support

rodent research. A major impact of the HTRC animal facility will be to support current and future NIH-funded projects by OHIO researchers, facilitate external collaborations that rely on the novel mice or mouse tissues generated by DI or OMNI investigators, and attract future, planned faculty hires within these institutes. Aligned

with its educational mission, OHIO will also use this building to train graduate, undergraduate and medical students in animal models of disease. Completion of the new translational research facility at OHIO, which relies on building the proposed animal facility, is expected to have a powerful and sustained impact on the

translational research efforts of DI and OMNI; their NIH-funded research; the research of their many external collaborators; regional companies that rely on OHIO’s infrastructure; osteopathic medical school research locally and nationally; and the underserved surrounding community.