This capacity is divided up into seven experimental areas, a technical material-sterilisation and management area, an administrative area, a refrigeration storage area and an area for types III and IV waste. All these areas are distributed between the ground floor and the two underground floors, enabling experimental procedures to be conducted under various biosafety – specific-pathogen free (SPF), conventional and biosafety level 2 (BSL2) – and microbiological conditions.

In addition, it also has a preclinical imaging platform (PIP) with rodent-dedicated optical-, tomographic-, ultrasound- and positron-emission imaging teams.

The LAS’s human team consists of a unit, an appointed veterinary surgeon, experts specialising in rodent-colony management and experimental models, care staff personal and staff from the technical, support and cleaning area.

On the other hand, the Vall d’Hebron Research Institute (VHIR) also has an Ethics committee on animal experimentation (CEEA).

The purpose of the Animal Facility is to:

• Offer accommodation for the maintenance, care and well-being of experimentation animals.
• Carry out periodic health controls to keep the animals in a good state of health and thereby obtain reliable and reproducible results.
• Meet the needs of users by providing them with the advice and facilities required for conducting their research with experimentation animals.
• Guarantee compliance with every legal and ethical rule relating to the use of animals for experimentation and for other scientific purposes.