Core Facilities are centralized laboratories within a network or a single research center, designed to facilitate access to advanced instrumentation and technologies through the experience and expertise of dedicated personnel.
“Core facilities are centralised shared research resources that provide access to instruments, technologies, services, as well as expert consultation and other services to scientific and clinical investigators. Institutions establish core facilities, including the corresponding costing structure of the facility, to provide required services to users generally, with all or a portion of the cost of these services charged to users’ accounts. The typical core facility is a discrete unit within an institution and may have dedicated personnel, equipment, and space for operations. In general, core facilities recover their cost, or a portion of their cost, of providing service in the form of user fees that are charged to an investigator’s funds“.
National Institutes of Health (NIH), (2022)
“A core facility is a collaborator who will not say ‘no’, unless there are technical feasibility concerns”.
Institutional core facilities: prerequisite for breakthroughs in the life sciences, EMBO (2016).
“They make it possible for researchers to gain access to specialized and unique technologies, state-of-the-art equipment, valuable materials, data management and, most importantly, they are the go-to place for expertise and competence“.
An international survey of Training Needs and Career Paths of Core Facility Staff, JBT (2021)
Core Facilities in the Research and Innovation ecosystem Scientific advancement is closely tied to the technological progress enabled by multi- and interdisciplinary research contexts.Major breakthroughs in Life Sciences, such as...
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The Network of Italian Core Facilities (NICo) was set up on the initiative of a group of Italian Universities and Research Institutes that had already individually established centralized technological platforms...
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