What You Need to Know If You Are Building or Renovating a Laboratory Animal Facility

Animal Lab News, a Vicon Publishing, Inc. publication, announces the 2nd annual TurnKey Conference to be held April 7-8, 2005 in San Diego, CA. The TurnKey Conference is all about building or renovating a laboratory animal facility and promises to provide attendees with the tools they need to make informed decisions and the strategies to help their institutions grow successfully.

During this 2-day conference, a team of industry experts will conduct workshops and present unbiased information on the latest innovations, technology, and thinking for facilities planning expansions, renovations, or new construction. A brief summary of conference sessions are as follows:

Maximizing the Flexibility of Facilities for Similar Animal Types will present feedback from Post Occupancy Evaluation Reports of a new 200,000 gsf multi-specie vivarium at Alcon Laboratories.

Animal Facility Commissioning will present experiences from the planning phase through the design/build construction process and finally building complications encountered while bringing a 40,000 sf Research Institute online.

Determining the Scope of a Project will help estimate the size, complexity, and potential cost of a project.

ABSL3 Facilities: Can We Do Anything to Reduce Risk While Increasing Flexibility? will describe the concept of a hermetic ventilated cage forming part of a system capable of bio-containment at cage level of the micro-organism under study during any procedural process.

Trading Spaces: A BSL-3 Renovation on a Budget will focus on one of the three BSL-3 facilities being created at the University of Texas at San Antonio which involved the gutting of an existing 700 sf space.

Interfacing a Large Lab Building into a Congested Medical School Campus will explain the design and construction techniques necessary to minimize disruptions to a project, and the successful actions to maintain an aggressive schedule and budget.

Hands Off! Vivarium Trends in Remote Monitoring, Automation, and Control will discuss how opportunities for real time, cage-by-cage remote monitoring far exceed a mere streamlining of existing processes.

New Vivaria: Planned Obsolescence? will address the problems of animal facility design and construction in the face of rapidly changing research programs, particularly in academia.

Successful Implementation of the Modular Turnkey Vivarium will provide guidance regarding when to and when NOT to consider the use of modular space.

Rodent Housing – Optimizing the Cage Environment will explore the various environmental parameters and measurements used to support these caging systems.

The World of the Automated Vivarium will discuss how, by integrating a Vivarium Management System into your daily operation, you can achieve a high level of facility management by truly understanding what is happening in real time so you can manage your facility at maximum efficiency.

Commissioning Biosafety Laboratories will highlight the elements and benefits of commissioning and will draw upon recent experiences in commissioning biosafety laboratories.

“Overall great job” and “Good first try” were comments from attendees at our first ever TurnKey Conference held in April 2004. “Building on the success in Baltimore, we’ve put together a stellar group of speakers and are pleased to once again bring this conference to the marketplace,” said Patrick Murphy, Publisher of Animal Lab News and President of Vicon Publishing, Inc. “We believe that there is no other event of this caliber addressing the needs of companies planning to build or renovate an existing laboratory animal facility. Quality information in a concentrated two day forum is exactly what the research animal industry needs.”

The registration fee of $845 includes admittance to all conference sessions, continental breakfasts, lunches, and breaks on both days, and cocktail reception. Conference hours will be Thursday, April 7th from 8:00am to 5:00pm and Friday, April 8th from 8:00am to 4:30pm. A vendor exhibit area will be open on Thursday, April 7th from 8:00am to 5:00pm and Friday, April 8th from 8:00am to 3:00pm. For more information or to register for the conference, go to www.animallab.com . Or contact Mary Williams at e-mail protected from spam bots; 603-672-9997 x113.

Published by Vicon Publishing, Inc., Animal Lab News is the leading publication of resources, products, and information to design, build, and equip today’s research animal facilities. Our pages feature the materials and equipment that go into an animal laboratory. Additional information can be found at www.animallab.com .