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Biosafety program

Biosafety program

Biohazards are defined as biological material that may potentially be harmful to humans, animals or plants.

Biohazardous materials include:

  • Microorganisms such as viruses, fungi, parasites and bacteria;
  • Microbial toxins;
  • Mammalian primary tissues, blood and body fluids;
  • Cell lines and other tissue culture;
  • Certain types of nucleic acids, such as DNA derived from pathogenic organisms, human oncogenes.

Prior to conducting any new studies involving biohazards, a Biohazard Permit Application must be submitted to Environmental Health and Safety (EHS) for review and approval. EHS must also be advised if there are any significant changes (e.g., change in biological materials or procedures) to a previously approved permit.

For assistance in determining the required level of containment, please contact Frédéric Guilhem at extension 7334 or Lorena Boju  at extension 5008.

EHS must be notified at least 10 working days prior to the scheduled transfer to ensure transfer compliance.

In case of an international transfer, EHS will prepare and provide necessary paperwork to be used by Canada Border Services Agency, to avoid seizure and/or destruction of the biological material.

For assistance with the transfer of biological materials from or to Concordia University, please consult this document.

1-Fill the transfer form and contact EHS.

2–Consult the additional guidelines for biological products shipments:

National shipments (Canada only)

International shipments

For information on Concordia University’s Occupational Health Screening Programs, please refer to the programs webpage.

Purchases of oligos from vendors approved by EHS will now be allowed either through the issuance of a Purchase Order in Unity (Request a non-catalog item) or by P-Card, within any applicable transaction limits and monthly limits. Please contact EHS if you would like to buy from other vendors, the whole before any purchase is made. Other vendors would need to demonstrate their level sequence verification meets the requirements of the International Gene Synthesis Consortium. Should this demonstration be successful, the vendor will be added to the list of authorized vendors once verification is completed.

To this day, EHS has pre-approved the following vendors:

1. Aclid

2. Aldevron

3. Ansa Biotechnologies

4. Atum

5. Battelle

6. BGI

7. Bioneer Corp.

8. Blue Heron - Eurofins

9. Codex DNA

10. The DAMP Lab

11. DNA Script

12. Edinburgh Genome Foundry

13. Evonetix

14. GenScript

15. Ginkgo Bioworks

16. GP-Write

17. IDT Integrated DNA technologies

18. Nuclera

19. Raytheon BBN

20. Synplogen

21. Thermo Fisher Scientific

22. Twist Bioscience

Please contact EHS if you would like to buy from other vendors, the whole before any purchase is made. Other vendors would need to demonstrate their level sequence verification meets the requirements of the International Gene Synthesis Consortium. Should this demonstration be successful, the vendor will be added to the list of authorized vendors once verification is completed.

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