Settling in to our new home

You know how it is when you move into a new place… it takes a while to make it feel like home.   While we moved to our new headquarters and donor center in May, we have spent the past few months since then getting settled. If you'd like to visit us, our new center is just east of downtown at 3636 Gateway Center Avenue.

By consolidating our previous headquarter buildings, our new location gives us 40 percent more usable space.  In addition, all of our labs are on one level, and have been completely streamlined.  For example, a conveyer belt in our Components Lab allows our Mobile Collection staff to easily deliver the blood that they collect each day on our bloodmobiles, right into the lab as they arrive back at home base.

We are also in the process of placing a large a sophisticated liquid nitrogen freezer for storing cord blood at temperatures lower than minus 150˚ Celsius on the outside of our building to support our cord blood program .  The two story liquid nitrogen tank will be able to supply the smaller nitrogen tanks inside the building.  Previously liquid nitrogen tanks had to be delivered to the second floor of our previous building on a small passenger elevator which proved to be quite inefficient.

 In addition, all of our previously far-flung offices are now located in one place. Before moving to Gateway, we had to house administrative employees in three separate locations.  The two story "glass cube" (picture) portion of our new building now houses all of the administrative staff  – while all the labs are in the one story portion.

The best part of our new building is we were able to design the labs from scratch – everything inside – even electrical "poles" can be moved around as we grow and change in the future.  Speaking of growing --- we still have a large portion of the one story space that has not been built out and is there for us as we continue to "move to the future!"