Facilities
The large, modern, well-equipped, laboratory facilities on the medical campus include over 2.65 million square feet of space (25 buildings) dedicated to education and laboratory research. Total research funding within the Medical Center is approximately $435 million per year, of which $366 million comes from the National Institutes of Health. The University of Michigan ranks eighth nationally in total NIH funding.
Research is greatly facilitated by the University of Michigan Biomedical Research Core Facilities (BRCF), which serve as campus-wide resources for developing and providing state-of-the-art biomedical research services. The BRCF ensure that individual investigators have access to new biomedical research services and costly instrumentation. They provide highly trained personnel to carry out technically demanding procedures, thus providing increased quality control and efficiency. The BRCF also sponsor relevant mini-courses and technical symposia. The cost of running the BRCF is subsidized by the University. The Core Facilities include the following (a partial listing):
- Animal Metabolic Phenotyping Core
- Bacterial Artificial Chromosome (BAC) Recombineering Core
- Biochemical Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Core
- Bioinformatics Core
- Biomedical Research Store maintains in-house stocks of restriction enzymes, cell culture reagents, and other related enzymes and molecular biology reagents from several vendors.
- Biosafety Containment Facility provides a safe environment for the culture and analysis of pathogenic Risk Group II and III viral agents, including HIV-1, HIV-2, HTLV-I, Hepatitis B and many other indigenous human pathogens.
- Center for Chemical Genomics High Throughput Screening (HTS) facility. HTS of small molecule libraries to identify chemicals that inhibit or activate enzymes and biological processes of interest. Also, HTS of siRNA libraries to all human or mouse genes to identify genes involved in biological processes of interest.
- Center for Molecular Imaging applies advanced imaging technologies to animal models of human disease. Available technologies include bioluminescence, MRI, PET/SPECT/CT, and fluorescence imaging.
- DNA Sequencing Core provides conventional and high throughput "next gen" sequencing.
- Experimental Irradiation Core performs gamma irradiation of cell cultures, tissue specimens, or animals.
- Flow Cytometry Core
- Hybridoma Core generates somatic-cell hybrids (hybridomas) that produce monoclonal antibodies of desired specificity.
- Metabolomics Core
- Microarray Core Facility - Supports Affymetrix and several other platforms.
- Microscopy and Image Analysis Laboratory provides facilities for light and fluorescence microscopy, confocal microscopy, and scanning and transmission electron microscopy.
- Morphology Core provides equipment and instruction to process, embed, section and stain paraffin or cryo samples.
- Proteomics and Peptide Synthesis Core provides research services in peptide synthesis, protein analysis and protein mass spectrometry.
- Transgenic Animal Model Core - Transgenic mice and rats, gene targeted mice, and related services.
- Vector Core produces state-of-the-art recombinant lenti/retroviruses and adenoviruses for use in projects related to recombinant gene expression and gene therapy. Also stocks Open Biosystem's full human and mouse lentiviral shRNAmir pGIPZ Libraries.
The University of Michigan Hospitals, the predominant site for clinical training, are modern, state-of-the-art facilities. There are more than 43,000 inpatient admissions and 1.6 million outpatient visits each year. In addition, the Medical Center has established satellite clinics and a 400-acre satellite campus nearby to provide expanded primary care outpatient services and related educational experiences. Clinical training is also undertaken at area hospitals including the Ann Arbor Veterans Administration Hospital. The Ann Arbor VA Hospital has 145 inpatient beds and 278,000 outpatient visits a year; it also includes 37,000 square feet of research space with an annual budget of $10.6 million dedicated for the use of Medical Center faculty.
The Medical Center also is the recipient of a $55 million Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) from the NIH, which provides resources for clinical and translation research performed in both the inpatient and outpatient settings.
The Taubman Health Sciences Library and the Learning Resource Center are up-to-date, spacious and comfortable. The University and the Office of Medical Center Information Technology provide computer resources and related services that are reliable, efficient and state-of-the-art.