Share thisThe final judges of how well a vivarium has been designed and constructed are its users—the personnel who work in it on a daily basis and keep it operating 24/7/365.
As the newness wears off, how the staff, managers, researchers, and maintenance personnel operate in a new facility changes, either because protocols change in response to research needs or because the users adapt their procedures to the facility. A well-designed and executed vivarium should support the protocols and procedures discussed during the design phase. It should also accommodate changes to those protocols and procedures with a minimum of disruption and/or physical changes.
Going back to a facility after it has been occupied and operational for a period of time, preferably a year or longer, is the best way for a vivarium designer to understand how well it is meeting the users’ needs. Formal post-occupancy surveys produce a great deal of useful, detailed, quantitative and qualitative information; they are usually negotiated as part of the design contract. However, much more informal means—phone conversations, meetings with the users, tours of the in-operation facility, email exchanges, etc.—can also be very effective.
We recently interviewed representatives of the users of a vivarium that has been occupied for about 1-1/2 years to learn more about their likes and dislikes, ideas they’ve had for improving the facility, and thoughts on what they would change if it were just now being designed.
The Indiana University School of Medicine opened its newest Lab Animal Resource Center (LARC) facility in 2008 as part of a multi-disciplinary center focused on cancer, neuroscience, and immunobiology research. The 13,320-cage vivarium houses mice and rodents,with capability to house aquatics studies in the future. General holding is accommodated in wall-mounted and mobile rack-mounted IVCs. Two procedure rooms serve general holding, and were designed to be convertible to holding rooms should the need arise. Survival surgeries are conducted in a four-room suite. A multi-use suite can be configured as conventional holding rooms, a barrier facility, or an ABSL-2 suite, depending on research requirements or population size. There is also an ABSL-3 suite that can support multiple, concurrent studies.
A number of changes were made from the original design (see sidebar “About the Facility”),most of them reflecting the evolution of the users’ protocols and procedures during the latter part of design and through completion of construction.That the number of changes was fairly small, and those changes were relatively minor for the most part, speaks to how engaging the users in the design and construction process from start to finish resulted in a facility that has met the users’ needs well. Among the most significant changes:
- The holding rooms were originally designed around IV Cracks in a library configuration. A wall-mounted IVC system was purchased instead, resulting in a significant gain in capacity (Figure 1).
- Since the vivarium now houses only mice and rodents, the surgery suite was changed from its original two-operatory configuration, to four smaller operatories with a common prep area and additional storage room(Figure 2).
- The doors from clean cage storage into the main corridor were deleted, allowing easier flow to and from the room.
- TheABSL-3 suite is currently being used for quarantine, as noABSL-3 studies are currently being conducted. Although use of IVCs inside the cubicles had been discussed, only static caging is being used.