Colony Management

COLONY MANAGEMENT

Biotest Facility offers a highly scalable colony management service for mice and rats. Our service is ideal for maintaining a small-scale backup population of an animal strains or for enabling a continuous production and delivery of research animals, we can help you. Biotest Facility has several separated mice and rat laboratories, allowing us to offer a very flexible colony management solution. Using a cost effective set-up Biotest Facility can either maintain a small backup population, or provide you with animals that match your requirements for age, weight, health, or disease stage.

HOUSING CONDITIONS

Mice housed at our facility are kept in individual ventilated cages, while rats are kept in ventilated cabinets. The air ventilation in the stables is set to an air exchange of approximately 12 h-1 and our standard set-up is to run a 12-hour day night cycle, with an option for reversion of the day and night. We provide standard enrichments for the animals, such as bedding materials, chewing sticks, and diet, but offer customisation if requested. The animal caretakers have a solid experience in the field, including topics such as study conduct, safety issues, and animal welfare.

ASSOCIATED ANIMAL RESEARCH SERVICES

Along with housing rodent colonies we can offer several associated services. Monitoring of specific parameters, such as animal growth, consumption of chow and drinking water, clinical observations, biomarker levels, etc.  Special set-ups involving surgical procedures, induction of specific medical conditions, or establishment of a specific microbial status for defined research purpose can be arranged. Transport of the research models to Sponsors facility will can be arranged, or a separate laboratory section can be offered for Sponsors use at Biotest Facility.