Facilities

The large, modern, well-equipped, laboratory facilities on the medical campus include over 1.8 million square feet of space dedicated to education and laboratory research. Total research grant funding within the Medical Center is approximately $205 million per year, of which $157 million come from the National Institutes of Health. The University of Michigan ranks sixth 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:

• Biochemical Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Core
• Biosafety Level 3 Core Facility
• Cell Biology Laboratories, which provide facilities for light and fluorescence microscopy, confocal microscopy, and scanning and transmission electron microscopy
• DNA Sequencing Core Facility
• Flow Cytometry Core Facility
• Hybridoma Core Facility
• Microarray Core Faciliities - Several exist on the Medical Campus, including an Affymetrix GeneChip Core facility accessible to all faculty, as well as several disease-specific micorarrray facilities that either produce custom DNA/oligo chips or use Affymetrix GeneChips.
• Protein and Carbohydrate Structure Facility
• Restriction Enzyme Stores Facility, which maintains in-house stocks of restriction enzymes and other related enzymes and molecular biology reagents from several vendors
• Transgenic Animal Model Core Facility
• Vector Core Facility, which produces state-of-the-art recombinant retroviruses and adenoviruses for use in projects related to recombinant gene expression and gene therapy

The University of Michigan Hospitals, the predominant site for clinical training, are modern, state-of-the-art facilities. There are more than 36,500 inpatient admissions and 860,000 outpatient visits each year. The adult hospital has a 16-bed General Clinical Research Center (GCRC) which is funded by a $4.4 million NIH grant. The GCRC suppports a large number of outpatient and inpatient clinical research protocols annually. 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, newly renovated in 1996. The Ann Arbor VA Hospital has over 170 inpatient beds and more than 190,000 outpatient visits a year; it also includes 37,000 square feet of research space dedicated for the use of Medical Center faculty.

The Taubman Medical Library and the Learning Resource Center are up-to-date, capacious, 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.