Rederivation

Biosecurity of our animal colonies is a top priority at BU.  The entry of pathogens into our facilities can go undetected but may result in lost time, money, and effort. To protect the integrity of everyone’s research, there are updated health status standards for each of our animal colonies.  Our goal is to provide healthy animals that can be used in research so you can perform your work with complete trust in your results.

Animal biosecurity is the product of all actions undertaken to prevent the introduction of disease agents into a specific area or colony.  While we continue to make improvement s in our facilities and our practices, we still have repeated incidence of pathogens being detected in different colonies.  To help shore up our program, we have worked closely with the Mouse Users Advisory Committee to refine our excluded pathogen program with the goal of establishing a minimally acceptable health status in all mice.  The intent is to maintain consistency between the health status of mice received from approved vendors so their health status remains the same from entry into the facility until the completion of your research.

While we have many of the pieces in place to exclude pathogens from infecting our mice, we still do not have the internal consistency we need to support your research.  To help improve the situation, we have developed a collaboration with the Transgenic (Tg) Core Lab to provide a large scale rederivation service for the medical campus rodent researchers.

The intent of the program is to rederive as many lines as possible in the shortest amount of time.  We will begin with our cleanest facilities, the 670 Albany Street rodent barrier, and work our way through the W9 barrier and then the W8 conventional facility.  Our plan is to optimize our likelihood for success, try to derive each line no more than twice, and get as many lines cleaned up as we can.   Not every line will get rederived to start, but it will allow us to move through as many lines as we can economically and efficiently.

By creating these economies of scale and some other efficiencies, we can offer this program at a substantially reduced cost.  By grouping the work and the testing, we can offer this program at the cost of $250-$300 per line.   This is a limited time offer, so when the program ends, the cost will revert back to the current estimates of roughly $1300.00 per line.

The program should have other benefits you might find helpful.  Having a common health status among different colonies will provide for better utilization of existing facilities and should allow for reduced crowding of rooms particularly in the conventional 8^th floor facility.  More importantly, we believe we will need less Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) to maintain our colonies.  Consequently, we expect that the cost to operate the barrier or sterile facilities will become less than the conventional facility.  While the per diem costs are now the same at $1.01 per cage per day, we expect to see the cost of the conventional caging to rise in the next fiscal year to about $1.06 per cage per day while we see no change in the cost of the barrier or sterile cage per diems.

To enter the program, please look for more information below.  There you will find program information about optimizing the success of your rederivation as well as the entry form to sign up.  Our goal is for you to provide us with the mice to be rederived and we return to you a pathogen free line in 3-4 months time.  Please feel free to contact me at drjlevin@bu.edu if you have any questions about the program or its goals.