Boston University and the University of Texas Medical Branch, in Galveston, have landed two unusually large federal grants for research to combat bioterrorism, the National Institutes of Health announced on Tuesday.
The Boston and Galveston institutions will receive $128-million and $110-million, respectively, to help build highly secure “biocontainment” laboratories for the safe study of dangerous microbes, including some that might be wielded by terrorists.
The NIH also announced smaller but sizable awards to nine other universities to build laboratories that, while somewhat less secure, will also allow the study of many of the most hazardous pathogens. Each university will receive one-time awards of $7-million to $21-million.
Those recipients are: Colorado State ($16.6-million), Duke ($12.0-million), and Tulane Universities ($13.7-million); the Universities of Alabama at Birmingham ($15.9-million), Chicago ($17.4-million), Missouri at Columbia ($6.8-million), and Pittsburgh at Pittsburgh ($17.5-million); the University of Tennessee Health Science Center ($13.8-million); and the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey ($20.9-million).
The one-time grants to Boston University and the University of Texas Medical Branch will enable them to build some of the most airtight, well-defended facilities ever constructed at an academic institution. Researchers will be able to work with pathogens that can cause life-threatening diseases for which there are no treatments, such as Ebola. The goal is to study microbes that might be used in a terrorist attack or that could cause a naturally occurring epidemic, such as West Nile virus and the virus that caused SARS.
Federal guidelines call for researchers studying those microbes to work in so-called Bio-Safety Level 4, or “BSL-4,” laboratories, which are specially designed to prevent the organisms from escaping into the environment or infecting lab workers. Federal rules stipulate multiple layers of guarded, locked doors and other barriers, as well as special purification systems for air and water inside such labs, and scientists working in them typically wear protective clothing that resembles spacesuits. Such laboratories are expensive to build.
Because of the perceived risks from the microbes, some Boston residents had opposed Boston University’s application for the grant. The lab would be built at the Boston University Medical Center, which is in the heart of the city, about two miles from the university’s main campus. Some residents have threatened to sue to block the project.
The university has tried to allay those concerns during 15 community meetings that it has sponsored since February, said Ellen Berlin, a spokeswoman for the medical center. “We intend to continue that dialogue,” she said.
In Galveston, by contrast, there has been little public controversy over the proposed lab. That’s in part because the university is just completing work on a building containing a BSL-4 laboratory that will be the first of its kind at a university. Medical branch officials sought the new NIH grant because they want more of that laboratory space.
The money for all the construction grants, $372.5-million, came from a large budget increase that Congress gave the NIH for bioterrorism-related research in the 2003 fiscal year, which ended on Tuesday.
The grants to Boston University and the University of Texas Medical Branch will also pay for the construction of somewhat less secure biocontainment laboratories within the same buildings, including BSL-3 facilities. Some studies of anthrax, for example, can be conducted in such labs.
The grants to the nine other universities will help them build labs rated at the BSL-3 level or below. The NIH required each of those recipients to team up with other universities in their region to use the new labs.
Many of the facilities will be built on the lead universities’ campuses. Others will reside off-site: Chicago’s will be constructed at the Argonne National Laboratory in Argonne, Ill. Colorado State’s will go on its Foothills campus. Tulane’s will be built at its National Primate Research Center in Covington, La.
Three of the 11 institutions that received NIH construction grants also received sizable grants from the agency earlier in September, to establish research centers to study defenses against bioterrorism and naturally occurring infectious diseases. They were Chicago, Duke, and the University of Texas Medical Branch. Each will receive an average of $9-million a year for five years.