Animal Resources

The BRIC SAI has resources at our disposal to help you with your animal needs.  The SAI Staff has years of experience with animal research including housing, regulatory (DCM, IACUC), handling, and other skills.  Contact us at bricsai@unc.edu with questions about animal handling.

Regulatory:

Protocol development: The SAI works closely with IACUC, DCM, and EHS to provide a safe, humane, and professional environment for animal imaging.  If you have questions about how to include animal imaging in your IACUC protocol contact us at bricsai@unc.edu

Animal Housing:

Marsico Hall:The primary BRIC SAI imaging suite has privileges with the Marsico Hall DCM vivarium.  The benefits of using this facility for your animals is that it is convenient to the SAI and animals can be returned to the vivarium if they leave for imaging or other experimentation.  We also maintain return cubicles for BSL-2 and radioactive animal housing.

Genetic Medicine Building: The SAI has a satellite imaging facility in the upper basement DCM vivarium of GMB that houses our IVIS Lumina optical imaging system and a Vevo2100 Ultrasound.  It is important to note that this facility does not allow the return of animals once they have left.

Importing Animals from External Institutions:  UNC allows the importation of animals from outside institutions and the SAI has extensive experience with this.  It is important to plan these types of transfers well in advance because it takes significant coordination and documentation for this to be done.

Animal Handling:

Injections and drug/contrast delivery:  IV, IP, IM, SQ, oral gavage, catheterization and infusions given before, during, or after imaging.

Tumor cell inoculation:  Delivery of tumor cells in a variety of methods including sq, iv, intracranial, and ultrasound guided injections.

Animal Id:  We offer tattooing and ear punch as methods of animal identification for our users.

Surgeries and post imaging services:

Surgeries:  We offer several imaging related surgical interventions that can advance your in-vivo studies.

Post imaging services:  Following imaging we are able to help with the following:  perfusions, organ harvesting, gamma counting, autoradiography, slide cutting and histology prep.