Laboratory Animal Husbandry Facility

The Laboratory Animal Husbandry Facility provides all basic animal husbandry. The facility maintains centralized foundation breeding colonies, and production colonies of selected strains of mice for use by all Fox Chase investigators. The centralized laboratory consists of two animal facilities located on the Center campus. The Research Animal Facility contains animal space distributed over four floors.

The first floor is a small suite of rooms devoted to Patient Derived Xenograft work in isolators. The second floor is devoted to support services, including cage washing, receiving area and storage. The third floor of this facility contains an SPF Research Barrier Area which houses most immunodeficient, and transgenic mice. Other lines of mice involved in research protocols are housed in an adjoining area of the 3^rd floor. Access to the 3^rd floor is limited. The fourth floor of this facility is for conventionally-housed mice.

All areas of the facility require the proper use of PPE including, scrubs, disposable lab coats, shoe covers, facemask, gloves and hair bonnet.

All mice are housed in high-density ventilated caging with automatic watering. All supplies are autoclaved into all areas before use. Animals entering the facility come from either the SPF Research Breeding Barrier, approved vendors or are rederived, by cesarean section or embryo transfer, from animals in quarantine.