Facility design and management: modern challenges and sustainability

The animal facility is where most, if not all, animal experimental work occurs. Therefore, properly designing and managing an animal facility is paramount to generating reliable, reproducible and sound scientific results. When thinking about designing and operating an animal facility, many different topics come to mind, each being of equal importance and having its own challenges and opportunities. A diversity of expertise is needed. However, it can all be summarized in the following way: the animal facility should be designed and operated in such a way that, at any time, the proper animals are housed in the suitable room with the dedicated equipment, and are overseen by the relevant persons, while at the same time minimizing the health and biosafety risks for people, animals, and the environment. This principle should be the driving force guiding a facility’s operation. One particular aspect that should be underscored is that animal facilities are a special case in research infrastructure: the facility’s activities cannot stop once it starts running. Facility managers and all the teams involved in the facility’s operations are responsible for the health, welfare, and well-being of the living, sentient organisms housed within their premises. These responsibilities should be reconciled with the inevitable turnover of personnel, the flexibility needed to maintain and repair the infrastructure, and the need to integrate new state-of-the-art scientific equipment. Adaptation and business continuity while maintaining high-quality animal care programs without jeopardizing scientific projects is the daily task of a facility manager. The success of such an enterprise starts from the very first day of designing a new facility. Our aim in this special issue is not to cover all the challenges, but to give a few examples of some issues faced by different types of animal facility and how they have been addressed in a specific environment. Thirteen articles are part of this special issue, covering the suggested topics in the call for submissions (role of personnel in animal care, animal health and environment monitoring, factors impacting the facility and sustainability). The concept of a unified research center with animal facilities of large dimensions, allocating experimental areas with quite specific equipment, is becoming more and more prevalent. Rebelo et al. elucidate the multiple benefits of unifying all animal units within a research center, including policies and pricing strategies. The proposed unified strategy facilitated the integration of even invertebrate animals and plant models in the core facility. Likewise, Richter et al. describe how automation and centralization of sanitation processes, physically separated from research buildings, save resources and provide organizational advantages. Ntafis also provide information on an efficient communication pipeline for imaging facilities that, by providing non-invasive, high-resolution, real-time tech