In any situation like this you should guard against pitfalls such as budgeting. With a lab so far away it will cost more money to visit the lab and to meet with the laboratory members for meetings. You should also generally guard against time to make sure that your project will finish before the end date or close to the end date that you have chosen. Based on the fact that the laboratory was chosen by only one of your team members you should have back up sources, universities, and laboratories to use incase this university does not perform the way you had initially intended. An important precaution you should take is developing a very well defined experimental design plan and target dates. Considering the company is far away you should schedule weekly phone calls and progress reports to see that the experiment is on track to finish on time. With animal studies you should prepare for problems such as running out of test animals or having a limited number of test animals in the age requirement that you need. You should have another animal vendor on call that you can use just in case this one does not provide what you are looking for. A well defined risk management plan should be set up, as communication may be slower with a distant company, both groups will need to know the back up so as to not waste any time waiting on communication delays.