"Studies show there is an average 17-year time lag between discovering better ways to care for patients and the common use of that knowledge by physicians," says Lorelee Wederstrom, director of the office of facilities planning within the University's Academic Health Center. "Upgrading our institution's capacity to perform translational research will ultimately help to shorten that time lag and to move experimental treatments into mainstream use much faster."

Defining Translational Research

Wederstrom explains that translational research does as its name implies—translates discoveries in the lab into valuable cures and treatments for patient care, involving clinical research and trials with real patients. She adds that translational research is typically interdisciplinary, collaborative, and usually involves animal research requiring strict care and containment controls.

U of M's new four-story TRF includes an 8,000-sf vivarium, and 35,000 sf of research laboratories that currently house 33 principal investigators and their staff. Although designed without specific users in mind, the TRF is now home to interdisciplinary researchers from the University's Stem Cell Institute, the Center for Infectious Disease and Microbiology Translational Research, and the College of Pharmacy's Orphan Drug Center devoted to the study of specialty drugs for treating rare conditions.

The University of Minnesota has a long list of accomplishments in translational research including breakthroughs related to cardiac surgery, transplantation, and biomedical devices. Currently the University is pursuing several models of translational research, including studies in its Stem Cell Institute related to heart disease, Parkinson's, muscular dystrophy, and spinal cord injuries.

"The work underway within our Stem Cell Institute is an example of researchers taking cellular and biologic information, or in this case, observations from the Human Genome project, and translating them into advances in clinical science," says Wederstrom. "Labs throughout the Institute are intermingled by discipline to encourage greater collaboration between the various departments, which include clinical pharmacology, pharmacogenetics, immunology, neuroscience, cancer research, and molecular medicine."

A Multidisciplinary Environment

The TRF is the third multidisciplinary research facility to be built at U of M within the last eight years. The first, the Basic Science and Biomedical Engineering building (BSBE), a $71.4-million facility was completed in 1997. The second facility, the $88-million Molecular and Cell Biology building (MCB) opened in the summer of 2001. In addition, a new $67.5-million medical bioscience building, which will be the fourth multidisciplinary facility at U of M, is currently in the predesign phase with funding proposals scheduled to proceed in 2006.

The BSBE, now called Nils Hasselmo Hall, was U of M's first research facility to use an open lab environment. The facility has 277,000 sf of research space with no hard walls dividing the lab space. Instead fixed lab benches are used as dividers. Alcoves and support space are located in the middle of the facility and are shared by all investigators regardless of discipline to encourage greater collaboration.

Similarly, research space within the MCB uses open lab space with no walls. In this facility, however, the lab becomes even more flexible with the addition of moveable benches and larger alcoves. Compared to the BSBE, this building contains more public interaction space and includes classrooms for graduate and undergraduate biology courses.

Comparing the Facilities

"When comparing floor plans of the three facilities, each plan varies just slightly in lab seating, the amount of bench space, and bench space relationship to lab equipment," says Wederstrom. "These relationships will shift again when planning our next facility to further maximize flexibility and opportunity for interaction and collaboration between researchers."

In contrast to the first two buildings, lab casework within the TRF is completely modular. All of the benches, utility services, and desks can be moved so it can easily be reconfigured. Since the benches in the TRF are completely moveable, services are no longer hard-piped to the bench providing maximum flexibility for power, data, and utilities.

The facility also provides bullpens for staff work areas in addition to some seating in the labs and conference and teaming facilities on each floor. Conference rooms are equipped for remote video conferencing. Each lab unit has a 120 sf alcove that is equipped with fume hoods or biosafety cabinets, shared equipment, microscopes and dark room capabilities to provide for research activities that cannot take place at the benches. In addition each floor is equipped with two environmental rooms and seven equipment rooms. The linear equipment room/corridor is located between the open lab areas and the alcoves, environmental rooms and shared equipment rooms.

"Alcoves started out quite small in the Basic Science building," says Wederstrom. "However we soon realized the importance of alcoves and moved to larger spaces in the Molecular and Cell Biology building and even larger alcoves in the TRF. Now while planning for the Medical Bioscience Building, we are programming two alcoves per PI.

"The initial response from researchers to the TRF has been incredibly affirming," says Wederstrom. "It continues to show us that high quality facilities play critical roles in helping the research discovery process to unfold and ultimately to apply those findings to patient care."

According to Wederstrom, the TRF was funded through a combination of public and private funding. The State of Minnesota contributed $24.7 million, the College of Pharmacy gave $2.3 million, and the William W. and Nadine M. McGuire Family Foundation provided $10 million.

She also credits a well-established, effective steering committee as the driving force behind the construction of all three of U of M's multidisciplinary research facilities. The committee, which is chaired by Dr. Frank Cerra, senior vice president for health sciences, includes Wederstrom, representatives from the University's capital project and planning management offices, deans of the medical school, the College of Pharmacy, and faculty representatives who may or may not have been assigned to the new building.

Lessons Learned

"Each time we build a research facility we learn from the process and try to apply these lessons to our next project," says Wederstrom. "A key lesson learned from the TRF project is that it is most cost-effective and efficient to save specific tenant improvements until the last minute possible since academic research environments are constantly changing."

Wederstrom points to the Stem Cell Institute, which was an unexpected tenant in the TRF at the time the building was programmed and designed. To accommodate the stem cell research, many of the benches were removed from the Institute's 17,500 square feet of space and tissue culture hoods and incubators were installed. Fortunately, due to the building's inherent flexibility, this change was reasonable to accomplish.

"To reduce the number of program change requests in the upcoming medical biosciences facility we plan to generalize the lab spaces as much as possible until we know the actual tenants," says Wederstrom. "A tenant-improvement line item is built right into that project's budget."

The need to program for flexibility is a second lesson advocated by Wederstrom. She points to specific examples such as designing proper space for alcoves and vivaria with enough room to allow for emerging research growth; planning for additional office space to provide greater flexibility in space assignments; and including team rooms to offer opportunities for interaction and collaboration. Providing more offices than planned PIs in the building permits greater flexibility in lab assignments. The ability to expand and contract labs as programs change is easier, and the investigator still retains an office.

"Looking at how space is ultimately assigned is another very important facility component," says Wederstrom. "Space planning should always consider the principles of efficiency, productivity, and programmatic fit or synergies, as well as the amount of interdisciplinary work taking place within the facility."

By Amy Cammell

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