Over the last decade a number of developments have enabled bold new projects to enhance biomedical research and deliver on the promise of precision medicine. Great importance has been placed on the establishment and sharing of centralized resources comprised of biological samples and information linked to or derived from the analysis of those samples. These resources are central components for highly productive biomedical research collaborations within and across institutions and contribute significantly to our understanding of biological mechanisms. The University of Miami has a number of well-established biospecimen collections that contain a wide array of samples from diverse patient populations in South Florida and across the country. These biospecimens support a number of active NIH-funded research projects on various cancers, cardiovascular diseases, Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and related diseases, multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson disease, stroke, Charcot-Marie-Tooth, age-related macular degeneration, glaucoma, autism, neural tube defects, deafness, and tuberculosis to name a few. In this application, we propose to build a new expanded centralized biospecimen repository facility with accompanying clinical research enrollment and biospecimen collection capabilities to enhance our university- wide translational research infrastructure. The planned construction will add an additional ~6,291 square feet of new usable research space on the first floor in the Central Energy Plant / Parking Garage Building at the Miller School of Medicine campus. This new facility will house a state-of-the-art university-wide biospecimen intake, processing, storage, and distribution service to provide a secure and sustainable resource for current and future biospecimen collections and collaborative biomedical research initiatives. The facility will contain two Hamilton next-generation automated storage systems including the BiOS XL8 to provide for -80C storage and the Verso M4 for -20C storage. These modular storage systems allow for increased security, efficiency, and expansion capabilities if additional storage capacity is required in the future. As the proposed location is ready for build-out, the proposed construction will only require two budgeted years in this application. Once construction is complete, we expect to move into the facility and initiate operations at the end of year two. This new biomedical research facility will provide modern infrastructure with future growth potential to our research enterprise. An experienced and collaborative team of dedicated research faculty, campus research leadership, and an accomplished project manager will lead this project.
