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New $75M Washington University Lab to House Genomics Center, Genetics Department

NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – The Washington University School of Medicine plans to break ground this summer on a new 138,000 square-foot building to house genomics, genetics, and regenerative biology labs, as well as labs for its Departments of Medicine and Developmental Biology.

The six-story, $75 million building will be home to the Center for Genome Sciences and Systems Biology, and will consolidate most of the department of genetics faculty in one location, Washington University in St. Louis said today.

The new facility, which is expected to be completed in the summer of 2015, will be located near other research facilities on the site of what is currently a parking lot.

Building a new, energy-efficient facility to replace 46,000 square-feet of research space that is currently in another building, will save money over the long haul, the university said, because it will be cheaper than operating and upgrading antiquated labs and retrofitting office spaces. The new facility also will host "highly flexible" lab space that can accommodate new research teams and interdisciplinary projects.

"The open lab design of the new research building provides a wonderful opportunity for us to jointly recruit faculty with preclinical departments," Professor Victoria Fraser, head of the Department of Medicine, said in a statement.

"We can embed faculty from medicine with investigators from genetics, developmental biology, genome sciences and systems biology, and we expect that significant scientific synergies will evolve by encouraging research interactions between clinical and preclinical departments," Fraser said.

WUSTL said that the recently constructed BJC Institute of Health building, which has 240,000 square feet of research space, is already occupied.

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