Contract Breeding & Aging

Charles River has over 60 years of experience breeding mice and rats with all types of genetic mutations, including knockout, transgenic, knockin, knockdown, inducible and conditional models. Our expert staff works with each client one-on-one to develop and execute breeding plans, troubleshoot difficulties and deliver cohorts of study animals. All of the work is managed in our revolutionary Internet Colony Management System (ICM™). ICM™ streamlines technician workflow, simplifies project management and provides a two-way communication portal for our customers to direct actions with their colonies, such as setting up matings, scheduling shipments and consolidating space. ICM™, combined with our dedicated team of project managers, offers more information, more control, and more efficient workload management than any other service provider.

Service Benefit
Production Breeding & Animal Holding Hold, breed and age animals in a biosecure, isolator-based animal facility that can ship your animals to virtually any facility worldwide. Reduce the time you spend managing rodent colonies and focus more time on your research.
IVF Colony Expansion Cut months or years off your breeding timelines by utilizing 
in vitro fertilization (IVF) to rapidly expand a small colony of animals to produce study cohorts faster.
Speed Congenics Eliminate half the time needed to backcross a model onto a defined inbred background. With speed congenics, a fully backcrossed colony can be achieved in five generations instead of ten.
Colony Startup Package Quickly confirm, expand and protect a newly acquired or created genetically altered line. Combines 
in vitro fertilization (IVF), background strain characterization and cryopreservation to create a fully established colony in as little as 15 weeks.

ICM™ is a revolutionary, custom-designed software solution for both project and vivarium management. Through the use of an RFID isolator/cage location tracking system and a workflow management package, ICM™ is designed to streamline animal technician workloads while capturing data electronically on each animal through the use of tablet computers and a simple, numerical keypad interface.

Key Features

  • Real-time data sharing among animal care and project management staff, as well as with clients
  • Two-way, data-rich customer portal to share information and direct colony and animal requests
  • Portfolio management capabilities showing high-level information such as current cage usage, activities, site usage and therapeutic area/investigator usage
  • Extensive filtering and sorting capabilities to quickly navigate to the data you need
  • Data export to Microsoft® Excel® to allow for custom data manipulation
  • Colony goal management with real-time updates on progress

Click here to watch a quick overview video detailing some of the exciting colony management tools available in ICM™.

You may also be interested in...

Genetic Testing Services

Charles River offers a complete set of genotyping assays to accurately assess the unique genetics of your lines.

Surgical Services

Charles River can surgically alter your unique animals for use in safety assessment or other lead optimization services.

Discovery Research Services

Charles River offers a host of therapeutic area-based services to provide baseline data on unique animal models.

Insourcing Solutions℠

Charles River offers training and staffing support for your internal vivarium and study needs.