Government Approves Planned Biodefense Lab

A proposal to bring a high-level biodefense research facility to Boston received federal approval on Tuesday, creating a new opportunity for researchers at Harvard and other local research institutions to perform tests on pathogens such as Ebola and Anthrax in their most dangerous forms.

Boston University’s proposal for a new Biosecurity Level 4 (BSL-4) facility—a set of maximum-security laboratories where work will include vaccine research in space-suit-like costumes—was accepted by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), a branch of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The laboratory, slated for completion by 2008, will be built in Boston’s South End from about $120 million in NIAID grant funding.

The lab is expected to draw about $1.4 billion in research funding over the next 20 years.

Dennis L. Kasper, executive dean for academic programs in the Faculty of Medicine, says researchers at Harvard hope the facility will help to expedite high-security research, presently competing for accommodation at the nation’s three existing BSL-4 facilities.

“If you have something that needs to be tested in a BSL-4,” he said, “you get in line.”

Kasper said he and his colleagues did not know precisely which projects Harvard researchers planned to pursue in the new facility. Projects presently underway will continue to seek research space at one of the existing BSL-4 facilities, rather than waiting five years for the project’s completion, he said.

The approval of this project coincides with a new wave of funding for biosecurity-related research at Harvard. The Medical School received $45 million from the NIH early last month to establish a new biodefense research center. Another $15 million grant to fund a Center of Excellence in Complex Biomedical Systems Research followed a week later for the Bauer Center for Genomics Research.

“A lot of new projects are just getting off the ground,” Kasper said.

But Harvard first expressed interest in the new facility when BU submitted its proposal last spring. “This proposal was put together by BU. We certainly supported the proposal,” Kasper said, noting that the facility would be vital to the development of vaccines and therapies.

The new BSL-4 laboratory, to be called the National Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases and Biodefense, is one of two new national biocontainment facilities to receive NIAID funding. Most research on deadly pathogens takes place on agents in their molecular or benign forms, Kasper said. But researchers often find it necessary to conduct tests on biological agents in their whole, dangerous states as their studies become more refined—a requirement that fired Harvard’s interest in the proposed BU facility, said Medical School Associate Dean for Public Affairs Don L. Gibbons.

“For that work to be as strong as it could be, we would require linkages to the BSL-4,” he said.

The virtually impenetrable security of a BSL-4 facility enables researchers to work with such parlous pathogens as aerosol-state Anthrax and HIV.

Ellen Berlin, a spokesperson for BU, said a number of New England institutions have expressed interest in using the new national facility. But she said no specific project uses have yet been determined.

In addition to the two new national centers, the NIH is endowing nine new regional laboratories. This flurry of research funding comes in the wake of pressure from Washington—through the president’s Project Biodefense and similar initiatives— to strengthen biosecurity research programs in the face of national security concerns.

—Staff writer Nathan J. Heller can be reached at heller@fas.harvard.edu.