The Piramal Healthcare Research Centre has a state–of–the–art laboratory animal facility in an exclusive, specially designed location having an area over 20,000 sq. feet. The facility has a clean and service corridor concept and has a separate designated area for animal breeding and experimentation. The facility breeds, maintains and carries out experiments on various strains of rodents in IVCs (Individually ventilated caging systems). The Animal facility maintains six strains of mice and two strains of rats, hamsters, guinea pigs and rabbits. All the animal rooms are maintained under controlled conditions such as positive pressure, temperature, humidity and photo period etc. The exclusive facility provided for animal experimentation is in the same premises, where a similar controlled environment is maintained like the animal breeding area.
Majority of the strains are bred under strictly inbred conditions. The main activity of the laboratory animal facility is to breed, maintain and supply quality animals to in-house researchers. The facility is registered under CPCSEA (Committee for The Purpose of Control and Supervision of Experiments on animals). All the activities of the facility are carried out as per the SOPs. The records of the day-to-day activity, animal breeding and experimentation are maintained as per the CPCSEA guidelines. This also includes regular monitoring of feed, water, microbial and genetic monitoring of animals. Animal caretakers and all the staff members are well trained and monitored for their health
Special facilities:
- A special facility is designed to maintain, breed and perform experiments on immunocompromised animals.
- There are two BSL 3 laboratory animal facilities to perform experiments using infectious disease models.