The proposed construction has two components. One is a renovation of an existing laboratory building at the OMRF to create a new shared Microarray Core Laboratory Facility from an existing mechanical room. The second component will create research laboratories from present outpatient clinic space and renovate clinical space to support a new clinical research unit. OMRF requests a National Institutes of Health (NIH) facilities award for the Fourth Phase of existing master plan. This construction adds new biomedical laboratory space on the first floor plus a microarray core laboratory facility and scientific office on the second floor of the east wing. Construction is planned to be done at the same time as the approved and funded third and fourth floor laboratory renovation which awaits relocation of sensitive mice to a quiet, construction free, custom designed new space that is under construction at this time and completely funded. This new shared Microarray Core Laboratory must be created to allow this technology to flourish. This new space is necessary since the current array facility occupies space on the third floor of the east wing that will soon be remodeled. The many projects benefiting from this core laboratory are carefully detailed in our application. Also, this award creates badly needed new laboratory space on the first floor by renovation of a portion of an old existing outpatient area to support a new expanded clinical research unit. The new clinical research unit will support many active research projects in cardiovascular biology and autoimmune disease that are heavily funded by NIH awards.
