The establishment of the APF was a key stimulus for significant research project, Genes for Immunity and Tolerance Consortium, awarded to the ANU by the US National Institutes of Health for 2002-2007. This project joins together ANU and other Australian immunology researchers with a complementary group of outstanding immunologists at the University of California San Francisco. This collaborative effort also establishes linkages with the Mutant Mouse Regional Resource Facility and the Jackson Laboratories West at UC Davis, to exchange cryopreservation and pathology methods and promote distribution of new mouse strains.

The APF underpins a large collaborative research program in immunology between ANU and Oxford researchers, funded by the UK based Wellcome Trust. In the 2003-4 year this program has been tremendously successful in pioneering screens to generate a large set of new strains with variant immune responses and discovered an entirely novel gene and mechanism for repressing immune responses against self.

The APF makes possible a large program in diabetes funded by the US-based Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation and the NHMRC, which in the last year has pioneered a strategy for sensitized screening to generate a large panel of new strains with variants in genes controlling diabetes.

In fields of obesity, gastroenterology, and neuroscience, the facility has also enabled collaborations between academic researchers at the ANU, Garvan, and the Mater Hospital in Brisbane and Phenomix Australia Pty Ltd, researchers at its San Diego counterpart, Phenomix Corp., San Diego researchers at the Scripps Research Institute and the Genome Institute of the Novartis Foundation, and researchers at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. In skin cancer genetics, collaboration between the UCSF, WEHI, and ANU has depended on APF pathology and database services.

The APF has also taken the lead in amplifying Australian expertise and mouse strain collections with complementary international efforts. APF staff were invited participants in planning meetings in the US and Europe in November and April which led to formation of the Federation of International Mouse Resources (FIMRe). FIMRe unifies and leverages expertise from the UK and the European Mutant Mouse Archive (EMMA), The Jackson Laboratory, the Canadian Mutant Mouse Repository, the Mutant Mouse Resource Centres funded by the US NIH, and key institutes in Japan to establish standard protocols, websites and nodes for listing, archiving and distributing strains with the express goal of enabling seamless access to new or old mouse variants around the world. The APF and NHMRC Phenome Bank will serve as the Australian node of FIMRe, with the goal of amplifying unique Australian-held resources and expertise by ready access to international collections and expertise.