The first facility grant will fund construction of a facility that will house monkeys assigned to a variety of research studies and state-of-the-art nursery facilities for infant monkeys, taking into account their unique social requirements. The new housing and procedure areas will replace existing square footage in the 40-year-old facility that contains both laboratory and animal housing. The existing animal housing space will be renovated eventually into laboratory space using other funds.
The new facility will be located on the Covington, La. campus according to the recently completed master plan and will functionally separate animal areas from laboratory areas, addressing security, access and biosafety issues that currently exist with the commingling of laboratory spaces and animal housing, says Andrew Lackner, director of the primate center.
The second grant funds a plan to create a national nonhuman primate breeding colony resource that will be built on the Covington campus of the Tulane National Primate Research Center. Primates bred from this national resource will be used to accommodate the increasing demand for these animals. Animals from this breeding resource will be used for ongoing NIH-funded research such as AIDS and for future biodefense research needs associated with the Regional Centers of Excellence for Biodefense and Emerging Infectious Diseases.
Improvements to land currently owned by Tulane University will include utilities, roadways, drainage, security, and fencing. In addition to corral housing for animals, buildings will be constructed for staging and quarantine of animals as they are received from or shipped to other facilities.