Scientists and Mice Ready to Move into $83 Million Center for Molecular Medicine at University of Nevada, Reno

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Reported by Annette Kreuger, Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas)--The University of Nevada, Reno (UNR) has targeted September 2010 as the opening date for the $83 million Center for Molecular Medicine. The project is the School of Medicine's first new medical research facility in three decades and will serve a number of departments, including microbiology, pharmacology, pathology, physiology and cell biology. Up to 40,000 mice will call the facility home.

Following the first successful gene transfers into mice in 1980, researchers have used mice experimentally to observe what happens to an entire organism during the progression of a disease. Mice have become essential tools for studying human diseases and their treatments.

Designed by Dekker/Perich/Sabatini to LEED Silver standards, the project contains two buildings with three stories each: a 60,000-square-foot medical office building (east wing) and an 80,000-square-foot laboratory building (west wing). The two buildings are linked by a third-story sky-bridge. In addition to the research laboratories, the first floor of the west wing is the location of the state-of-art vivarium, the future home for the transgenic mice. The Whittemore Peterson Institute for Neuro-Immune Disease will be located in the east wing.

Clark & Sullivan Constructors (Sparks, Nevada) broke ground on the project in late 2008. Before structural erection could take place, the company had to address the challenges of the building site. The area was formerly a V-shaped draw that had been filled in and was unsuitable for conventional concrete footing construction. Large granite boulders up to six feet in diameter lay buried at the site. The problem was solved by digging 125 caissons, which were up to six feet wide and 60 feet deep, to support the planned buildings. Filling the caissons required 4,000 yards of concrete and 162 tons of rebar.

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