Facilities

The Biospecimen Accessioning and Processing (BAP) Core at Mayo Clinic's campus in Minnesota is located at the Marvin Building (2915 Valleyhigh Drive NW), Rochester, Minnesota.

The Biospecimen Accessioning and Processing (BAP) Core at Mayo Clinic's campus in Minnesota is located at the Marvin Building, 2915 Valleyhigh Drive NW, Rochester, Minnesota. The BAP Core in Arizona is located in Scottsdale, Arizona, and Phoenix, Arizona. The BAP Core at Mayo Clinic's campus in Florida is located at the Campus Support Center in Jacksonville, Florida.

Laboratory Space

The BAP Core in Minnesota is located in the Marvin Building at Mayo Clinic's campus in Rochester, Minnesota. This facility has a total of 60,000 square feet of dedicated space to enable all BAP, Pathology Research Core and storage-related activities in Minnesota, including IT support consolidated into one central, state-of-the-art, highly automated facility. A single, centralized institutional facility provides numerous advantages, including greater efficiency, increased automation, greater uniformity, and increased standardization of procedures and processes, all leading to high-quality material for investigators. The goal is to automate as many of the processes as possible, including sample storage.

In the event of a disaster, the facility was designed to protect the specimens, with:

  • Two separate sources of city power coming into the building, each from a different substation and each of which can provide 100% power to the building.
  • An on-site generator to provide back-up power should there be a loss of power from both line sources.
  • Three bulk 13,000-gallon liquid nitrogen tanks to provide liquid nitrogen to the robotic freezers, which will maintain a temperature of 80°C below zero until power is restored, in the event of a complete power loss.
  • Two compressors for each chest freezer in the robotic freezer system, only one of which is required to maintain temperature. One freezer (capacity of approximately 9 million tubes) contains 10 chest freezers and 20 compressors. One of the chest freezers (approximately 1 million tube capacity) is always left empty for emergency movement of samples.
  • Key-card controlled access to the laboratory space.

All freezers are on a wireless automated temperature tracking system. Alarm settings are predefined, and laboratory personnel are notified (24 hours per day, 7 days per week) if a storage unit has reached its upper or lower limit. All freezers and equipment are monitored under a preventive maintenance program by the laboratory staff. In addition, the facility maintains an on-site repair shop, and back-up freezers are available as needed.

This facility was constructed to provide additional expansion space for future growth in support of all biorepository laboratory services and storage needs.