Genomics

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 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.

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.

The University of California, Los Angeles is planning to construct the $41.8 million Broad Stem Cell Research Center. The 34,587-sf project was awarded $19.8 million in funding from the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine in May of 2008.

Stanford University will break ground in 2009 on the 200,000-sf Stanford Institutes of Medicine 1 in Palo Alto, Calif. Housing the Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine, the $200 million project received $43.58 million in funding from the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine in May of 2008. Completion is expected in 2011. The project team includes Zimmer Gunsul Frasca Architects and The Whiting-Turner Contracting Co.

Stempeutics Research opened a 5,000-sf stem cell research facility on the campus of Manipal University in India in July of 2008. Located at Shirdi Sai Baba Cancer Hospital, the cGMP laboratory will support therapeutics research and production with two Class 10,000 cleanrooms. The facility is designed to USA Foundation for the Accreditation of Cellular Therapy (FACT) standards and employ cGTP (current Good Tissue Practice) manufacturing processes.

The University of California, Merced is planning to construct a $7.5 million stem cell instrumentation foundry on its campus at Castle Airport in Atwater, Calif.  Supported by $4.36 million in funding from the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, the 8,000-sf facility will enable the creation of devices for single-cell analyses.

The University of California at Santa Cruz will construct a $12.9 million stem cell research center on the fourth floor of its planned Biomedical Sciences Building. Supported by $7.2 million in funding from the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM), the 19,829-sf facility will house interdisciplinary stem cell research laboratories. The project will include core research areas, microscopy, and tissue culture rooms. 

The University of California, Santa Barbara is renovating 10,337-sf in its Biological Sciences 2 Facility to house the Center for Stem Cell Biology and Engineering. The $6.3 million project is funded by $3.2 million from the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine. The collaborative stem cell research facility will include a core laboratory with a high throughput sequencing apparatus, offices, conference rooms, and support.

The University of California, Irvine will initiate construction in fall of 2008 on the $60.5 million Sue and Bill Gross Stem Cell Research Center. Funded by an award of $27.2 million in May of 2008 from the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM), the 61,575-sf facility will house up to 26 researchers and is slated for completion in July of 2010. The three-story building will include a core stem cell lab, cell culture facilities, imaging, clinical space, and biotechnology training facilities.

The National Institutes of Health awarded Scripps Translational Science Institute (STSI) a $20 million Clinical and Translational Science Award in June of 2008. STSI is a collaboration between The Scripps Research Institute and Scripps Health in partnership with other San Diego institutions. The award will support biomedical research in genomics, stem cells, and applications of wireless technology.

The University of California, Berkeley has selected contractor McCarthy to build the $160 million Li Ka Shing Center for Biomedical and Health Sciences. Accommodating research into the molecular basis for disease, the facility will focus on infectious diseases, gene regulation, stem cell biology, and neurodegenerative diseases. The project architect is Zimmer Gunsul Frasca Partnership. Construction is slated to begin in 2008 and reach completion in 2011.

The University of Maryland, Baltimore dedicated Building Two at its BioPark development in April of 2008. The six-story, 238,000-sf research facility will house tenants including the Institute for Genome Services, Gliknik, Paragon Bioservices, Westat, and the 38,000-sf Baltimore City Community College’s Bioscience Institute. The first two BioPark buildings were developed by Wexford Science & Technology. UMB broke ground on Building Three in spring of 2008. BioPark’s $500 million, 1.2 million-sf campus will be comprised of ten buildings upon completion.

The University of California, San Diego has selected  Zimmer Gunsul Frasca Architects to design a new biomedical research facility on the Health Sciences campus in La Jolla. The project will include approximately 150,000-sf of wet-bench laboratories, laboratory support, laboratory core facilities, and office/conference space to accommodate biomedical research programs at UCSD’s School of Medicine, including a new multi-department program in genomic medicine and expanded department of neurosciences.