ITHACA, NY (WENY) -- Cornell University's College of Veterinary Medicine will expand and upgrade, thanks to a $19.5M capital investment. Veterinarians, animal owners, and livestock producers rely on the testing done at the Animal Health Diagnostic Center and the New York State Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory to help keep their animals safe.

"The partnership between New York State and Cornell University [is] to provide high quality, veterinary diagnostic laboratory services to the state and the region far beyond New York... [People] depend on this testing... to diagnose diseases, to recognize new diseases as they occur, and that in turn has a very important public health impact. By helping control diseases that can also affect people and also to produce safe and plentiful food for people," said Lorin Warnick, the Dean of Veterinary Medicine at Cornell University.

Warnick said the laboratory helps support animal health and people's health in NYS by testing the animal/sample individually if it's submitted by a vet or a lab, or to do surveillance on livestock populations to detect and distract diseases as they occur.

"The best example people are familiar with is the highly pathogenic avian influenza, which has recently crossed over into dairy cattle. That's something at the federal/state level [and] people are working hard to prevent the spread of that disease. This laboratory [plays] a key role in responding to that disease," said Warnick.

There are about 250 faculty and staff who test animal specimens/samples for any diseases.

"We have 12 testing laboratories, mostly infectious disease that include biology, bacteriology, parasitology, ... and molecular diagnostics. We have a toxicology laboratory, endocrinology laboratory, coagulation, and we have a clinical pathology laboratory... Our laboratories in endocrinology test for hormones in multiple species. We have comparative coagulation laboratories that look at coagulation factors in animal blood," said Francois Elvinger, the Executive Director for AHDC and NYS Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory.

Elvinger said many diseases they test for in animals also affects humans.

"Case and point was the SARS-COVID-2 pandemic that we all dealt with. Our biology and molecular diagnostics laboratories were the first to detect an infected animal with SARS-COVID-2 in the country [which] was a tiger in the Bronx. At the start of the pandemic, the veterinary diagnostic laboratory has a national animal health network level one laboratory had the capacity to test large volumes of samples. We used that capability, capacity, and expertise to set up a testing laboratory for COVID for humans," said Elvinger.

Elvinger added, "[We] were able to run up to 11,000 samples a day... We expanded our capacity and expertise with testing for COVID to the point we are now using that same expertise to go back into the animal health world where we are testing for HPAI. Since March, we started testing milk samples to make sure the HPAI is not in our NYS dairy cattle."

Elvinger said the award money is crucial as it will help expand the services the College of Veterinary Medicine offers.

"It will allow us to further increase the sample volume. Every month, months over months, since the pandemic we have seen our caseload increase and we don't see an end in sight for increasing demand for diagnostic services," said Elvinger.

Cornell University will chip roughly an additional $10M for the project. With the $19.5M from the capital investment, it would expand the facilities by 2,600 square feet. The space would be used for labs and administrative spaces.