Biomedical

The Medical University of South Carolina will break ground by year-end 2008 on a $55 million bioengineering building in Charleston. The four-story, 100,000-sf facility is slated for completion by late 2010. The building will house 36 wet lab and office suites, dry computational labs, and a 600-person conference room. The facility, which will be connected to an 114,000-sf drug discovery center, will support stem cell and biomedical research.

The Commonwealth Medical College broke ground on the 185,000-sf Medical Sciences Building in Scranton, Pa., in August of 2008. Designed by HOK in partnership with Highland Associates, the facility will support medical education for over 500 students and will accommodate 175 full-time faculty members. The Medical Sciences Building is comprised of a west research wing and an east instructional wing linked by a courtyard.

Pacific Northwest University of Health Sciences (PNWU) opened the 45,000-sf College of Osteopathic Medicine in Yakima, Wash., in August of 2008. The $19.7 million facility will provide health science education for primary care physicians as well as offering degrees in nursing, public heath, and psychology. The private, not-for-profit college is planning to open the College of Allied Health Sciences and the College of Biomedical Sciences as early as fall of 2009.

The National Institutes of Health will provide $70 million annually over four years to a network of nine centers engaged in chemical probes research. The initiative is designed to support the use of small molecule probes, an important tool for the exploration of cell processes, leading to the development of new therapies. The Molecular Libraries Probe Production Centers Network is the second phase of a program begun in 2004 as part of the Molecular Libraries and Imaging Initiative under NIH's Roadmap for Medical Research.

The University of South Dakota dedicated the Andrew E. Lee Memorial Medicine and Science Building in Vermillion in September of 2008. Part of the Sanford School of Medicine and the School of Health Sciences, the facility houses technology-rich faculty research laboratories, classrooms, and offices.

The University of Texas at Austin dedicated the $55 million Biomedical Engineering Building on August 28, 2008. The 141,000-sf, six-story building houses classrooms, research laboratories, and administrative offices for the Biomedical Engineering Department. The College of Natural Sciences and the College of Pharmacy also occupy individual floors. The interdisciplinary building features nine optics labs constructed two stories below grade for minimization of vibration.

The University of California at San Francisco (UCSF) will break ground in fall of 2008 on the 74,832-gsf Institute for Regeneration Medicine on its Parnassus campus. Designed by Rafael Viñoly Architects, the $128-million facility is supported by a $34.8 million grant from the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM). Housing multidisciplinary stem cell research, the 46,283-asf project will be comprised of four split-level floors housing wet labs, support and offices.

Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory (MDIBL) dedicated its LEED-certified research facility in August of 2008 in Salisbury Cove, Maine. Doubling the footprint of MDIBL’s existing building, the 15,000-sf facility houses the Morris Center for the Environment and Human Health, the Boylan Center for Cellular and Molecular Physiology, the Marine DNA Sequencing and Analysis Facility, laboratory space for six research groups, and a teaching lab. The construction manager for the $7.1 million project was Nickerson and O’Day of Bangor.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is constructing the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research in Cambridge, Mass. The project broke ground in March of 2008 with completion slated for December of 2010. The 365,000-sf, seven-story plus basement facility will have a footprint of 45,000 sf and will be connected to existing facilities by underground tunnels. The project architect is Ellenzweig with William A. Berry & Son as general contractor.

The University of North Carolina's $126 million Genetic Medicine Building will open in fall of 2008 in Chapel Hill. Housing the School of Medicine, the School of Pharmacy, and the Division of Laboratory Animal Medicine, the 333,000-sf facility will house the medical school's departments of biochemistry, pharmacology, and genetics. The project will include open laboratories, classrooms, offices, NMR, and vivaria. Ground was broken on the seven-story building in February 2005.

Northern Illinois University broke ground on the $160 million Proton Treatment and Research Center in West Chicago in June of 2008. Sited in the DuPage National Technology Park, the 115,000-sf cancer treatment facility will open in February of 2010. Housing research, treatment, and medical offices, the nonprofit center will treat up to 1,500 patients annually. The project team includes architect VOA Associates and developer CenterPoint Properties.

Laboratory Corporation (LabCorp) is partnering with Duke University’s Translational Medicine Institute to build a 40,000-sf biorepository at the North Carolina Research Campus in Kannapolis. Construction began in summer of 2008 and will reach completion by spring of 2009. Housing laboratories, offices, computer rooms, and freezers, the laboratory will have the capacity to store up to 10 million specimens and patient samples for researchers in the academic, healthcare, biomedical, and pharmaceutical sectors.

Rice University is constructing the Collaborative Research Center in Houston. The 477,000-gsf project broke ground in December of 2006 and is slated for completion in early spring of 2009. Sited on 2.9 acres, the ten-story facility will accommodate bioscience and biotechnology research. The estimated construction cost of the LEED-certified facility is between $200 million and $300 million.

West Virginia University dedicated the $43 million Biomedical Research Center and the $17.5 million Health Sciences Learning Center in Morgantown in August of 2008. The four-story, 120,000-sf Biomedical Research Center houses the Multiple Sclerosis and Neurodegenerative Diseases Research Center, the Sensory Neurosciences Research Center, and other biomedical research facilities.

Charles Stark Draper Laboratory is planning to create a bioMEMS research and development center at the University of South Florida in Tampa. The facility will support research in microelectromechancial systems for biomedical applications in partnership with USF and its medical school. Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, based in Cambridge, Mass., will also construct a production center in St. Petersburg for the manufacture of multi-chip modules combining multiple integrated circuits on a single chip.