While the BRI is arriving 11 months later than expected, it is also a better building. As Peter Brown, Harvard's associate director of animal resources, notes, "Any large construction project always has many, many change orders. By having to do the building a second time around, all the change orders were folded into the actual construction drawings, which cuts out a lot of extra cost."

What were the notable changes?

"In the mechanical spaces, we repositioned much of the equipment to make it more accessible and functional. We haven’t changed the layout of animal holding or procedure rooms," says Brown.

Before rebuilding, members of the planning/design team spent about five months studying the best way to proceed. Working with consultants and the faculty, they labored to devise a means of absolutely decontaminating the structure.

"A lot of the research in the building will be olfactory in nature," says Brown. "There was a lot of insulation and plastic burning. Any residual odors would not be tolerable."

That decision led to demolishing the interior back to the structural concrete box. Then cleanup crews sprayed ground dry ice on the walls to decontaminate the pores of the concrete and eradicate all smoke and ash.

"We tried salvage and partial cleaning, but total tear-out was the most efficient way to guarantee complete decontamination," Brown relates. "It was less expensive to demolish than to attempt cleaning. We have some very detailed cost figures on various means of mitigating the situation. We worked closely with our insurance companies on selecting the best approach, and they've been very cooperative and helpful."

Mice and Automation: Both Growing

With the proliferation of research into transgenic and gene-targeting technology, Harvard is facing a significant uptick in the use of the mouse model.

"Originally, we forecasted a 25 percent yearly increase in mouse use once in the new building, but figures from elsewhere in the country indicate even larger increases than what we have programmed," Brown says. "So now we have upped the forecast to 30 percent."

Facing the prospect of such rapid growth in animal population, BRI planners recognized the need to address issues related to higher staff productivity as well as concerns for worker health and safety. Incorporating automation, particularly in the cagewash area, became a high-priority goal in the building design.

"We wanted to take those full-time equivalents out of cage wash and get them into animal rooms providing direct care to the animals," comments Brown.

One consequence: instead of the classic floor-mounted, articulated-arm, foundry-type robots, Harvard opted to install gantry-type robots for the cagewash.

"The gantry robot has a gripping tool with essentially the same multi-axis dimensional capabilities as the foundry robot, but it operates from an overhead rail system," explains Brown. "By keeping the mechanical portion above the head, the design allows floor areas to remain clear of obstructions, dirt, and debris."

The gantry robot arm gripping tool will pick up four soiled mouse cages from the transport pallet, invert them, then scrape and empty the soiled bedding into a funnel collector vacuum system for removal to an outside dumpster. Then it places the cages onto the conveyor of a standard tunnel washer. On the clean side, the cages are turned over and bedded. A camera eye on the second robot tracks the bedded cages, the robot picks them one at a time, and stacks them on a pallet for sterilization and the eventual return trip to the animal room.

"The system enables us to reassign staff from less desirable jobs," he emphasizes.

Edstrom Industries, manufacturers of automated animal watering systems, has studied, recorded, and analyzed the many steps involved processing water bottles. In a 20-rack facility, with 140 cages per rack, and one bottle change per week, the labor cost for bottle handling hits an estimated $55,500 a year—and that includes neither $4,900 in bottle replacement costs nor harder-to-calculate utilities, according to Eric Edstrom, the company's marketing manager.

Nor does it include workers' compensation costs. Brown reports that in a study conducted at another facility, water bottle handling incidents accounted for two-thirds of the accident insurance claims from the cagewash area.

"The twisting, turning, and lifting were a real problem, to say nothing of issues with carpal tunnel syndrome, which is prevalent whether water bottles with stoppers or twist-off caps are being processed," Brown observes. "Even one claim can put a crimp in your financial picture."

Focus on Watering

All animal rooms in the BRI will connect to an automatic watering system originating from a central RO/chlorination source. The in-room piping features a quick-disconnect to each ventilated rack manifold, delivering water to each cage through a detachable A-160 valve.

This automated approach provides high-quality drinking water while saving a great deal of time, but Brown points out that it still requires a certain amount of attention.

"There are people involved, and it's not service free," he remarks.

Moreover, planners had to incorporate a way for individual cages to receive their own water supply. For example, a small percentage of animals doesn't adapt well to the automatic watering valve; others need to receive medication or additives as part of an experimental protocol. These override situations mandate a supplemental means of supplying water.

"In our facility design criteria we assume that at any given time 20 percent of the total cages will require some source of water other than the centralized supply," notes Brown.

After examining automated systems for processing water bottles, Harvard began looking for an alternative means of providing hydration. The design team determined that Edstrom's disposable sipper sack concept, which entails filling low-density polyethylene bags with water within the animal room barrier, was the most efficient method of delivering water at the individual cage level.

Had the choice been bottles instead of the sipper sack, Brown calculates that the BRI would have required 6,400 bottles for the 20 percent of its 32,000 usable cages. As a backup, 3,200 bottles would always be in some phase of washing or processing.

"That investment of approximately $50,000 would recur about every four years," Brown says. "Then we would have to purchase bottle baskets, dollies, and all necessary material handling equipment, for another $300,000. These capital outlays do not even include the $300,000 price tag for a process robot capable of uncapping, washing, filling, and capping water bottles.

"In addition to the bad ergonomics," he continues, "it's an expensive way to deliver water, especially in a huge facility. There are proposed projects that will double or triple our capacity here of 40,000 cages. Imagine handling individual bottles under those circumstances."

User-Friendly Solution

Harvard examined two different approaches to the disposable water-bag concept. The first configuration was based on sacks filled in a central location and transported to the animal holding room. This method failed to eliminate many of the ergonomic and potential contamination issues that can occur while bottles are in transit from the central fill area to the animal room.

The alternative, Edstrom's sipper sack, which taps directly into the automatic watering system's animal room distribution piping, turned out to be much more user friendly, barrier controlled, and economically attractive.

The sipper sack system includes several components: a reusable drinking valve, disposable flexible sacks, a stainless steel insert for the cage, and the automated filling station. A stainless steel liner inserted into the wire bar lid protects the plastic sipper bag from being chewed by the animals in the cage. Used sacks are sliced in half with a shielded sharp tool and then deposited into a bin for separation of unused water and recycling of the bags.

To start the filling process, the animal care technician loads a bag in the device and then flips up the fill nozzle, which automatically starts dispensing water. In the meantime, the technician transfers the animal from dirty to clean cage.

"The fill operation occurs in the animal transfer station (ATS) in a Class 100 atmosphere," says Edstrom. "There is really no time lost. Both things are happening simultaneously."

However, training in the operation of the full system is essential in order to achieve optimum performance, Harvard found. Animal care as well as research personnel need instruction in tasks such as inserting and priming the drinking valve, positioning and removing the bag for filling, and injecting medication with a needle or syringe through the preformed hole after the bag is filled.

"We incorporated the SOP for the sipper sack operation into our standard training protocol that both animal care technicians and researchers must take before they are granted access to the animal holding areas," says Brown. "Card swipe privileges are not available until they have completed the course work.

"We found, though, that over time some individuals need to be retrained," he cautions. "It is actually fairly easy to pinpoint who is not handling the sipper sack in the proper method."

Beta Testing

Harvard conducted beta site testing of the sipper sack with 500 cages of stock and breeding mice in ventilated racks.

"We chose a very demanding research lab group, assuming that if the sipper sack made them happy, we would be in pretty good shape," Brown relates.

Conditions of the test were stringent. All equipment and bedding were sterilized and diet irradiated. All personnel entering the animal holding rooms were completely gowned. Sterile animal transfers and manipulations were carried out in the ATS. The RO water had no chlorine or acidification. (Harvard does acidify its water bottles on filling to keep the bacteria count down.)

Divided into two phases, the testing first used bedding composed of standard eighth-inch corn cob, and then a mixture of quarter- and eighth-inch corn cob plus the product Alfa-dri, from Shepherd Specialty Papers. Although both types of bedding proved successful, the latter combination was more effective at avoiding wet cages when the sipper sack was correctly installed in each cage.

A progression of changes in the design of the insert, coupled with renewed staff training, also improved cage dryness by eliminating incidents like a corn cob lodging in the sipper valve and animal chewing of the sipper sack bag, and minimizing inadvertent activation of the drinking valve by its improper placement through the cage insert/lid access hole.

Overall, the sipper sack beta test proved to be a "great success," Brown reports.

"We are looking at the sipper sack as a supplement to automatic watering, not as the sole provider of hydration," says Brown. "It's been an evolutionary process, but we have come very close to our goals."

By Nicole Zaro Stahl

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