Animal Laboratory Design has Advanced. Has Your Lab?

State-of-the-art labs are more efficient, cheaper, and more pleasant for the animals housed there than older designs. Despite all these advantages, most labs are decades out of date, say laboratory architect Jeff Zynda of Perkins&Will and laboratory veterinary consultant John J. Hasenau. The longtime collaborators point out that outdated labs are missing out on a broad range of improvements—from more efficient HVAC systems to a deeper understanding of light spectrums to better cage design—that are more comfortable for the animals, more useful for the scientists, and less expensive to operate.

Many animal research laboratories still operate the same way they did when they were installed 30-50 years ago. “Our community is risk-averse, and there have been a lot of legacy situations where people are not willing to move forward with the technology,” says Hasenau.

This is a mistake, they say, as the new technologies are more efficient, more sustainable, and lead to better scientific outcomes. “Why don’t we start to rethink some of the design principles from first principles, and eliminate some of the waste that we encounter in the types of projects that we are all designing and you are all occupying?” asks Zynda.

The opportunities are substantial, particularly in HVAC, vivarium footprints, and animal-centered designs:

HVAC

Right now, laboratories’ biggest cost-savings opportunities are in HVAC. “Sixty-three percent of any given vivarium budget is in the conditioning and movement of air,” says Zynda, “so that’s your biggest target. If you were to do nothing else, our recommendation would be to look at how one reduces air change rates, reduces the intensity of that heating and cooling cycle without impacting outcomes in science.”

For rooms that have animal housing, some standards ask for up to 20 air changes per hour (ACH), according to Zynda. Despite the fact that many modern rodent cages are now essentially their own little buildings, many labs are still ventilated as if this were not the case. “We’re still ventilating rooms at a rate that would be sufficient if we were combining the cage environment with the room, when in fact we don’t need that, because we are creating that environment,” says Zynda.

This means it is possible to cut the room’s circulation dramatically without compromising the animals’ health, according to Zynda. Overall, reducing the airflow from 15 ACH to 6 ACH can reduce the cost from $3,480 per room annually to $1,920.

Given that HVAC systems eat 63% of a lab’s budget, such a painless improvement can lead to very significant overall cost savings. “You realistically can start to see a 45-50% reduction on a room-by-room basis,” says Zynda.

Space

Cage density is another area ready for reconsideration.

Consider the common 11-by-22-foot holding room module, which is generally designed with a central aisle that is 5-6 feet wide, “so we can change out cages and accommodate these pesky humans that keep showing up in all our animal facilities,” says Zynda. 

Robotic gantries similar to those used at warehouse distribution centers can make it possible to install a much narrower aisle. Instead of the standard 5- or 6-foot-wide aisle, the aisle might now require only 30 inches for cage retrieval. Overall, this can save as much as 36% in terms of the original footprint, making it possible to reduce space needs from 240 sf to 150 sf, according to Zynda.  Instead of 480 cages in a room, it’s possible to install 600-650 cages, a 36% capacity gain.

A smaller, denser footprint can have other knock-on effects as well, says Zynda, such as further reducing the volume of air that needs to be changed. “It’s a kind of a one-two punch, if you will,” he says.

Robots are going to change other spatial requirements too, says Zynda. “If you want to have a highly efficient and highly operationally effective facility, whether you are redesigning or building new, you want to think about these types of changes that are starting to happen.”

Five Ways to Make your Animals Happier

Some of the changes Zynda and Hasenau recommend are focused less on saving money and more on how to make animals less stressed and more comfortable. Five factors in particular are worth considering right now:

1. Higher temperatures

A lot of research has clarified the temperatures where rodents thrive. “Thermal regulation is very important for rodents. Their circadian fluctuations are well understood,” says Hasenau. 

What is somewhat less clear are the ranges for transferability. As many as 85% of rodent studies have taken place at temperature ranges that were outside of the animal’s thermoneural zone, which can alter the data and make the data translation to humans less accurate, he adds.

Mice prefer warmer spaces (26-38 C, or 78.8-100.4 F). Beyond temperature, however, the amount of substrate and nesting material at the bottom of the cage can also affect rodent stress levels. 

If you do decide to heat a room more, getting up to around 32 C (89.6 F), it is important to install 30% more insulation to keep the heat from leaking beyond that room, says Zynda.  

2. Build better housing.

Most primates—including the non-human variety—love a view. “Most of the non-human primates we house are arboreal—tree-loving—and they like to go up and look out. To help with that kind of behavior, we modified the housing units to give them the opportunity,” says Hasenau. Modern designs feature balconies that give the animals a place to look down, and secluded areas ready for when they want to indulge that other common primate desire to get away from their roommates. 

The new designs also include playrooms, windows to corridors, and iPads with video feeds to their caretakers’ stations, enabling the primates to become more acclimatized to staff, according to Hasenau.

3. Check your animals’ light sensitivities.

It’s also worth checking your animals’ light sensitivities. For example, it’s now known that zebra fish are sensitive to the red spectrum, and under a red light they tend to feel stressed. “On a lab design that I was involved in, an exit sign cast a red light over an area, and the zebra fish wouldn’t breed. A very simple move to a code-acceptable green exit sign alleviated that problem,” says Zynda. 

“Everyone sees lighting as primarily designed around the human vision component, not around the animal research need,” says Zynda. He warns against less expensive red-green-blue LEDs, because their wide red spectrum can have deleterious effects on the animals. 

Hasenau recommends wavelengths between 480 and 585 for LEDs but notes that there is a growing number of more species-specific recommendations. In particular, he recommends Robert J. Lucas’s paper on violet-pumped white LEDs.

4. Install more monitors.

Digital monitoring reduces the workload in the vivarium by letting lab workers know what conditions are like in every cage. Between that ongoing electronic cage-monitoring and robotic removal, says Zynda, “now you can have a very efficient operation because you’re not changing all 650 cages on a bi-weekly basis. You might be changing only 50% of them or 20% of them. You can be incredibly targeted in where you put your labor efforts, whether those are human or robotic, and really start to drive down the cost of operations through efficiency.”

5. Watch out for electronic interference.

The growing number of radio waves and other electronic signals needs to be considered, because they can interfere with other electronic data collection. 

“The more we start to implement these digital technologies, the more we need to be cognizant of the interferences, because they could have impacts on animal health and welfare,” says Zynda. “Because if you're relying on a digital monitoring system to say, 'This cage is dirty and it’s being interrupted,' or, 'The signal is not being well received,' obviously, there will be an impact on operations.”

Handling electronic interference is not impossible, in Zynda’s view, but the designer needs to be aware of it as a potential factor. “These can all be addressed through either tuning or shielding, or looking at ways of placing these elements elsewhere in the building. But if you’re not aware of this as a compounding extrinsic factor, you’re not going to design around it,” he says.

Performance Standards

All these suggestions involve reaching a goal rather than meeting a guideline. That’s not an accident: After designing 8 million sf of vivaria in the course of his career, Zynda has come to believe that it’s more important to focus on performance standards than engineering standards. 

Engineering standards are prescriptive and specify characteristics and technical details that must be met by the products, systems, and processes. By contrast, performance standards are outcome-based and more open to creative solutions. They enable designers to incorporate species-typical behavior into their thinking and offer flexibility to consider potential alternative approaches. Designing for performance standards can result in significant savings without compromising research integrity. 

Animal laboratory culture tends to be conservative. A lot depends on the care and handling of the animals, after all. But these innovations make it possible to take better care of the animals with less environmental damage for less money and with better outcomes, say Zynda and Hasenau.

To make changes within the institution, they advise making return-on-investment business cases, which “tend to be very well received, because people go, ‘Oh, this is a no-brainer—why wouldn’t we invest, $100,000 to save $500,000 over the span of three years?’” says Zynda.

More generally, Zynda argues the lab community needs to bring its approach to design into the 21st century. “Let’s stop designing around the standards we’ve been following for decades, and start getting back to first principles,” he adds. “And, as a community, talk about how we can start to incorporate this to change some of those standards, or at least be open to variances within them.”

By Bennett Voyles