April 28, 2009

Carle Foundation Hospital opens state-of-the-art research facility

Biomedical Research Center The Carle Foundation Hospital Research Institute has opened its Biomedical Research Center, developed on the third floor of the Mills Breast Cancer Institute/Carle Cancer Center.  It will provide exceptional laboratory space, basic equipment, and support staff for scientists and their teams investigating areas such as breast cancer, neuroscience, cardiovascular and gastrointestinal diseases in collaboration with Carle Foundation Hospital medical staff.

The 27,676-square-foot facility was designed with input from researchers, so it is ideally suited to their needs down to the smallest detail. Its laboratories, offices, conference rooms and storage areas will ensure optimal working conditions, as well as supporting collaboration with sites elsewhere in the world, according to William Schuh, MD, medical director of the Carle Foundation Hospital Research Institute.

Some of the features the Biomedical Research Center include:

  • Modular furniture in labs, enabling researchers to reconfigure spaces as needed.
  • Twelve alcoves, shared by researchers, designed with either biological safety hoods for research involving cell cultures or fume hoods for research involving chemicals that need to be handled under a hood.
  • Cold and warm rooms for temperature-sensitive experiments
  • Extensive range of basic equipment, including high speed and ultra centrifuges, refrigerator and freezers, microscopes and cryopreservation storage
  • Emergency backup power, ensuring valuable research will not be lost in a power outage.
  • Teleconference-enabled meeting rooms, facilitating collaboration with colleagues across the world.

James Leonard, MD, president and CEO of the Carle Foundation, hailed the new facility as a major step forward for the research community and for the public at large. "We are thrilled to be offering researchers this new and highly specialized venue for their valuable work."

Carle officials look forward to this new laboratory being a hub of research activity and a place where scientists and physicians come together to foster discoveries.  Anna Keck, PhD, executive director of the Carle Foundation Hospital Research Institute, indicated, "Within the next two years, we hope to have up to 30 lead researchers, with a total of 60-70 people working here at any given time." In addition to researchers based at Carle, the population using the facility will also include those from the University of Illinois, and visiting researchers from institutions across the country and the world. The focus of the research will be on translational research projects. Also known as ‘bench to bedside' research, translational research takes scientific discoveries arising from laboratory, clinical, or population studies and turns them into clinical applications aimed at reducing the incidence, morbidity, and mortality of cancer and other illnesses.

Construction of the $10.6 million Biomedical Research Center was funded in part by a gift from Linda and Doug Mills, whose generosity enabled The Carle Foundation to build the Mills Breast Cancer Institute.

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