To facilitate the expansion of University researchers' current work with anthrax and other biological agents, the University plans to build a five-story Regional Biocontainment Laboratory on Lane Road.
The University will submit a proposal to the National Institutes of Health for a $14 million grant this Friday, Feb. 7. The money would go toward offsetting the estimated $60 million that the facility will cost to build, said Dr. William Petri, chief of the University's infectious diseases division.
Petri said NIH should make its decision by August, clearing the way for the University to begin preparations to build the facility.
"If the grant is awarded in August, there will be an additional year of planning before construction starts with the goal of moving into the building in August of 2006," he said.
Without the grant, Petri said the project would take "at least a year" longer to complete.
The new facility will allow University researchers to expand their current research on organisms such as anthrax and tularemia, which can be loaded onto warheads. Tularemia was part of the biotechnology arsenal of the former USSR, Petri said.
"There's already work being done on these agents, but there are a lot of experiments that cannot be done because we do not have the proper facilities," he said.
Currently at the University, researchers working with certain sensitive agents cannot conduct their experiments on live organisms. For research involving anthrax, scientists use purified toxins in place of live bacteria. Experiments with tularemia use purified DNA, Petri said.
In the new facility, "any work with, for example anthrax, will occur in biosafety level 3 labs," he said.
Marie-Louise Hammarskjold, professor of microbiology and chair of the institution biosafety committee, said there are four levels of biosafety.
A level 4 facility works with highly contagious and dangerous agents such as E. bola and smallpox, she said.
Security precautions in such labs are like what "a lot of people have seen in various movies such as Outbreak, with people dressed in special suits," she said. "We're not going to do that kind of work," she added.
Petri said the new facility will follow a strict safety plan.
"Only people that have been background checked and trained to work in BSL 3 labs will even be allowed into that part of the building," he said.
Petri said BSL 3 safety protocol also involves sending all lab waste through an autoclave before it is discarded and employing an air-filtration system.
He said adherence to this protocol would ensure that "nothing leaves this lab that is contagious" when the new system is in place.
Petri said the greatest benefit of the new facility would be its proximity to other University research facilities.
"The new lab will be in a central location, surrounded by other medical research labs," he said. "This means that someone who is working on anthrax can walk over and talk to someone in the pharmacology department who can give that researcher insight. It will also be minutes away from the Biology and Chemistry departments so those scientists can participate in what's going on," he added.
The intention will be to "encourage scientific intellectual exchange between people who are working on unrelated things," Petri said. The new facility, "will be designed with that in mind."
"There is a lot you can accomplish from something as seemingly sterile as designing a building," he added.
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