This application from the Office of the Associate Provost for Animal Research and Resources at Johns Hopkins University (JHU) requests $500,000 in financial support toward the total purchase price of $521,379 for individually ventilated cage (IVC) racks for housing specific pathogen free (SPF) rats and mice in a recently renovated animal facility in Dunning Hall at the Krieger College of Arts and Sciences at the Homewood Campus. A portion of the basement of Dunning Hall was renovated during the winter of 2009 to create 4 animal holding and 1 procedure/animal holding rooms, and a cage rack wash down room. Two of the animal holding rooms will be equipped with 6-70 cage Allentown single sided IVC mouse racks and two with 6-40 cage Allentown single-sided IVC rat racks. The procedure/animal holding room is capable of holding 2 of either kind of rack and will also be able to hold a Biosafety cabinet for animal procedures if needed sometime in the future. These animal rooms will be used to hold breeding animals and animals being held prior to study. Animals will be transferred, housed and used in Levi Hall, which is connected by an underground tunnel to Dunning Hall. The two investigators who will have animals housed in the Dunning Hall facility using the caging purchased with these G20 grant funds have total direct cost Federal funding of almost $ 2.26 million, $ 1.88 million of which comes from the NIH. The addition of this animal holding capability in Dunning Hall will allow the animal holding space in Levi Hall to be used for supporting the research programs of the other investigators on the campus who have $ 5.6 million in grant support from the NIH.
