Winning a $1.6 million federal grant to buy a robotic system to store 1 million blood, urine and tissue samples was easy compared to finding space for it at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.

The "monster" machine, to be known as the university's "bio bank," is 13 feet wide, 20 feet deep and 10 feet high, said Dr. Alan Shuldiner, associate dean for personalized medicine.

But free lab space is scarce on the school's West Baltimore campus.

Officials plan to put that shortage in the past with a groundbreaking ceremony Tuesday, marking the commencement of construction of a $305 million, 429,000-square-foot biomedical research building. The structure would become the largest on the University of Maryland, Baltimore, campus and provide space for a research enterprise that officials say is bursting at the seams and difficult to coordinate across disciplines.

While the medical school's research funding from external grants and contracts grew 28 percent from fiscal years 2008 to 2011, lab space remained constant. By one estimate, the school is using less than a third of the space its research activity warrants, something officials said hurts its ability to attract faculty and pursue new research opportunities.

"The good news has been, we have been very fortunate over the past decade or more in having very rapid growth in our research programs," medical school Dean Dr. E. Albert Reece said. "The bad news is we have just fundamentally run out of space."

In October, crews will begin demolishing the former home of the university's School of Dentistry, at Baltimore and Pine streets, to make way for the new research building. The university hopes to open the 10-story facility in January 2018.

State money will cover all but $65 million of construction costs; the university plans to raise the remainder from private sources.

Plans for the building date back about a decade, when it started to become clear research space was filling up, said university President Jay Perman. Even in 2001 and 2002, during the planning of the school's newest research building that opened in 2003, it was clear it would be filled quickly, Perman said.

"Space is easily the most precious commodity in our environment, and something needed to give," Perman said. "It's a wonderfully enabling process to be able to get started with this long-envisioned building."

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UM medical school to break ground on much-needed research space