The Vermont Pulmonary SCOR is conducting and proposes to continue to conduct in vivo as well as in vitro studies of cellular mechanisms in lung injury and fibrosis. The research therefore relies heavily on two aspects of this core facility: The first is controlled exposure of experimental animals to extremely hazardous aerosols and/or gases. The second major function is the maintaining of an animal facility to provide investigators with a source for clean animals for in vivo experiments other than inhalation studies, maintaining exposed animals while the lung injury/fibrosis is allowed to progress and providing animals as a supply of cells, lavage materials or tissue for in vitro studies. The goal of this core is to supply the needs of the SCOR investigators as necessary to meet the experimental aims and objectives involving the use of rats in their research. In 1982 a new facility for housing and exposing animals to toxic agents was designed and constructed in the Department of Civil and Mechanical Engineering in the Votey Engineering building. The facility maintains HEPA filtered air to all animals and is essentially a modified barrier facility, which meets or exceeds all NIH guidelines proposed for the caring of vertebrate animals. The facility has the capability to provide whole-body exposure to asbestos, non-fibrous mineral dusts and NO2 at this time. In addition, a nose-only teflon exposure system has been developed for exposing a limited number of rats to steroids or similar materials. The Department of Civil and Mechanical Engineering has recently purchased a positive-pressure, filtered air, rack enclosure which also allows the facility to handle athymic rats or others which may be more highly susceptible to infection. The establishment of a Core animal care/Inhalation Exposure facility within the Pulmonary SCOR will enable us to meet the variety of interdisciplinary research needs of the SCOR investigators with high quality animals, maintained under clean conditions yet minimizing the overall expense that would result if duplication of effort were to be incorporated into individual projects without the existence of the facility.
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