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The Brooksby Building

The Brooksby Building will be a high containment facility for large animal (HCLAF) experimental work on high consequence pathogens such as foot-and-mouth diseases virus (FMDV).  

The building will have all the engineering features of high-containment to the highest international standards that will allow safe working for our staff and protect the environment.  The new high containment building will provide a stand-alone SAPO4 and ACDP3 large animal facility with sufficient flexibility to house small animals (mice, guinea pigs, rabbits), for in vivo experiments.  The Brooksby Building is crucial in the overall development of the Pirbright Campus and will be a key component that allows sustained success in livestock & zoonotic pathogens research.

Pirbright’s facilities and associated scientific and operational expertise in in vivo viral disease experimentation is not replicated elsewhere in the UK.  Current in vivo facilities for high containment work can accommodate large animal species including cattle, pigs sheep and goats.  The capacity of the facilities is nationally unique in that up to 95 cattle or 200 pigs (depending on size and age) can be housed under high containment at one time.  Under future phases of development, a new large animal facility will be constructed on site, with our current facilities to be split into a specific avian in vivo facility and additional large animal capacity.  

View a 360 tour of one of our existing large animal isolation units here: Laboratory animal tour.
 

History

John Brooksby CBE
In 1939 John Brooksby joined the Foot-and-Mouth Research Institute at Pirbright.  His laboratory was designated the World Reference Laboratory for foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) in 1958 and, this year in 2018, we will celebrate 60 years.  John became Director of the Institute in 1957 and Director of the Animal Virus Disease Institute in 1964.  He spent many years developing vaccines for FMD and swine vesicular disease.  He was instrumental in the investigation of the 1967-8 outbreak of FMD in the UK and also worked in disease outbreaks overseas.  He was chair of Food and Agriculture Organisation and World Organisation for Animal Health Committees for research and the control of FMD.  He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1971, Fellow of the Royal Society in 1981, and Fellow of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons in 1978. 

Contact

For further information please contact:
The Pirbright Institute
Ash Road
Pirbright
GU24 0NF

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