Duke University Medical School received a $12 million award for the construction of a regional biocontainment laboratory from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, as part of a new series of biodefense funding awards announced Tuesday.
The new facility, one of nine biocontainment laboratories funded by NIAID, will provide research space for the $45 million Southeast Regional Center of Excellence for Emerging Infections and Biodefense. Construction for the facility, which will be built as an addition to the Duke Comprehensive Cancer Center Isolation Facility, begins in 2004.
Four of the nine NIAID awards to build new biocontainment facilities were given to the SERCEB consortium--one of eight regional biodefense centers across the nation. The other three SERCEB facilities will be located at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Tulane University and the University of Tennessee.
"This new grant provides Duke with the opportunity to expand our current biocontainment space and to support SERCEB research," Dr. Sandy Williams, dean of the School of Medicine and principal investigator for the facility, said in a statement.
The current biocontainment facility, with 40,000 square feet of research space, will double in gross size with the new addition. "It comes at a wonderful time because the institution is quite short for space as it is," said Dr. Barton Haynes, director of the Human Vaccine Institute and leader of the SERCEB consortium.
Until the facility is completed in 2005, SERCEB researchers will continue to squeeze into the current isolation facility. Haynes said 95 percent of the facility's current activity is related to cancer research, so biodefense research will have limited resources in the meantime. "If we could build the new facility tomorrow, we would be able to completely fill it with funded research," he said. The Cancer Center Isolation Facility was built to have the capability of functioning at biosafety level four--the highest governmental classification for biocontainment laboratories, where researchers have to wear space suits akin to those worn in the movie E.T.
"It was built in 1972 to mimic a government facility," said Operations Manager Cindy O'Neil.
Research at Duke, however, only involves BSL 2 situations and no BSL 4 research will be conducted in any campus facility.
"The facility will be like a platform to help do the basic science and research of emerging and infectious diseases," Haynes said. Haynes also noted that the new facility will increase the ability for Duke, North Carolina State University, North Carolina Central University, East Carolina University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to compete for grants, since all of the schools will have access to the laboratories.
"In this day and age of limited resources, it's great that we're able to build this sort of facility on campus and make it available to those institutions responding to the needs of society when understanding new emerging diseases is only going to become increasingly more important," Haynes said.
In addition, the Durham County Health Department, which is located just a mile off East Campus, will also have access to the facility. DCHD Health Director Brian Letourneau said the new facility will provide the regional infrastructure for research on emerging pathogens and potential bioterrorism threats.
"We want to be prepared in the case that a nefarious group tries to use biological weapons," Haynes said. "I'm not talking about bio-weapons research--academic institutions don't do classified research--but we want to learn more about post-bug or virus interactions and use these parts to gain insight that can be used to protect the citizens."
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