An injection of federal stimulus funds and lower real estate values have created both opportunity and delay in bringing a shared-use laboratory mouse facility to Yonkers that would be the first of its kind in the U.S.
The Academy for Medical Development and Collaboration (AMDeC), a nonprofit, Manhattan-based consortium of 26 of the state”™s medical schools, academic health centers and major medical research institutions, in early 2008 announced plans to open a $10 million shared-use mouse facility by winter or spring this year at I-park N-Valley in Yonkers, a renovated technology center in former Nepperhan Avenue factory space.
The facility, whose selectively bred mice would be used by biomedical researchers at AMDeC”™s partner institutions, will be managed by Taconic Farms, an international breeder of in vivo research rodents with headquarters and the world”™s largest mouse-and rat-breeding facility in Columbia County.
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Dr. Maria K. Mitchell, president of AMDeC, said the project was delayed in part because of greater demand for mice cages from institutions. The federal stimulus package also brought more government funding for the project. Meanwhile, decreased real estate costs have the sponsors exploring their leasing options, she said.
“I-park remains a major place that we”™re looking at,” Mitchell said. That the project might be located outside of Yonkers is “very unlikely,” she said.
Mitchell said 30,000 square feet to 40,000 square feet of space will be needed for a facility that could house 40,000 cages at full capacity.
“I think we”™ll have a much better handle on it at the end of this year,” she said.
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The mutant or genomically altered mice will be used by researchers at Rockefeller University, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York University School of Medicine and Columbia University Medical Center.
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Mitchell said AMDeC and Taconic Farms might offer cage space on a temporary basis to other researchers.
Project sponsors have secured a $4.5 million federal Economic Development Administration grant and $8.5 million in state appropriations. Mitchell said AMDeC also has applied for a $7.5 million federal grant for capital equipment from the National Institutes of Health.
Consortium officials said the shared facility will provide improved and more efficient access to mice that are reliably disease-free, helping to attract the best and brightest genomics researchers to New York. It will reduce the overall cost to participating institutions by several million dollars a year, freeing up scarce resources for other research priorities, they said.?“The economic environment really changed a lot and forced everybody to look at things differently,” Mitchell said. “It really made a lot of sense for us to step back.”
“The longer this has gone on, the more opportunities we have gained out of it and I think it will be a better facility at the end of the day”¦AMDeC is very committed to this project.”
Mitchell said the only other shared-use mouse facility is the Toronto Centre for Phenogenomics in Canada. “It took them eight years” to complete, she said.
