Venom Lab

Our custom built facilities are aimed at the safety and security of our staff and animals. The lab is arranged into three areas - invertebrate housing, snake housing and the venom extraction and research area.

The venom extraction and research area lends itself to safe handling of the animals according to our detailed risk assessments and procedures. We have specially developed equipment to reduce the risks to staff to an absolute minimum during the procedures. As well as the day-to-day running of the lab and venom collection, we also have a range of research projects underway, which include toxicology, product development and basic biology of the animals in our care.

All our invertebrates are housed in a temperature controlled rack system where the animals are monitored on a daily basis and attention is given to their specific husbandry requirements. We are also leading the way in captive husbandry of dangerous invertebrates (Safe Laboratory Management of True Spiders (Aranaemorphae) of Medical Importance- Poster 13, LASA winter meeting 2010).

Our venomous snakes are also housed in a custom built, temperature controlled rack system. The snakes are housed individually when not breeding in locked mobile enclosures such that they can easily be removed from the rack ready for safe manipulation prior to milking.