Infrastructure as strategy: How Baylor College of Medicine built a vivarium to drive translational discovery

Translational research pipelines accelerate or stall based on the infrastructure connecting animal studies to clinical application—and institutions that treat the vivarium as a support function rather than a strategic asset tend to find out too late. Joe Petrosino and Rebecca Blackwood describe how BCM positioned its new vivarium as the operational foundation of an integrated ecosystem including CGMP manufacturing, preclinical development, and early-phase clinical research. They outline the planning criteria used to determine scale, program mix, and departmental adjacencies, and address how leadership secured stakeholder alignment around a capital investment framed as a driver of institutional research competitiveness.