U.S.  Selects Sites for Biodefense Research Network

By David Ruppe
Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — A U.S. federal agency this week named 11 academic facilities to receive funds for building or upgrading high-security, biological defense laboratories.  Recently established security requirements for such sites have been a source of contention this year, and one facility’s president has called for a national debate on the issue.

In an announcement Tuesday, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said it would establish two National Biocontainment Laboratories by providing $120 million each to the Boston University Medical Center and the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston.

The institute, part of the National Institutes of Health, plans also to fund nine Regional Biocontainment Laboratories at Colorado State University, Duke University, Tulane University, University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Medicine, the University of Chicago’s Argonne National Laboratory, University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, University of Missouri-Columbia College of Veterinary Medicine, University of Pittsburgh, and the University of Tennessee Health Science Center.  Each center is slated to receive grants of between $7 million and $21 million.

All facilities are required to provide matching funds.

High-Security Work

The National Biocontainment Laboratories would be biosafety level-2, -3 and -4 facilities, with BSL-4 providing the highest security required for work using potential terror agents such as the bacteria responsible for anthrax and plague and the Ebola virus.

The regional laboratories would be constructed for BSL-2 and -3 work.

“These awards to build high-level biosafety facilities are a major step towards being able to provide Americans with effective therapies, vaccines and diagnostics for diseases caused by agents of bioterror as well as for naturally occurring emerging infections such as SARS [severe acute respiratory syndrome] and West Nile virus,” said Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson in a statement Tuesday.

Security and Safety Concerns

Critics who have opposed various bids for the funding have expressed concerns about the security and secrecy measures the laboratories would be required to adopt by federal law.

In particular, a federal antiterrorism law signed last year, the Public Health Security and Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Act of 2002, is understood by experts to bar laboratory officials from releasing certain information on select dangerous agents (see GSN, Sept. 5).  It prevents the public disclosure of the location and quantity of such agents and requires federal and state authorization before laboratory officials can notify the public and local authorities of any theft or accidental release.

The law is intended to protect the public by controlling information that might aid terrorists, but concerns that the security measures might endanger the public reportedly prompted Davis, California, Mayor Susie Boyd, to withdraw her support for the University of California at Davis’s ultimately unsuccessful bid for funding.

In another case, the University of Texas Medical Branch, citing federal and state laws, refused to release the minutes and documents of its biological safety committee meetings.

National Institutes of Health guidelines require such information to be disclosed, said Edward Hammond, whose watchdog group the Sunshine Project is seeking the information or, lacking that, the suspension of the facility’s newly announced federal funding and the security upgrade.

“We would argue it’s inappropriate for them to get this award, because it’s pretty clear they are not in compliance with the [National Institutes of Health] guidelines,” he said.

Some researchers argue, however, that the security measures are reasonable.

“There are certain things that will not be available, and we are precluded by law from making those available.  The USA PATRIOT Act [of 2001], and Homeland Security [Act of 2002], and Texas laws as well … do not allow us to say where some of these agents are stored.  They don’t allow us to give the quantity, the room number, the freezer box number,” said C.J. Peters, who heads the branch’s current BSL-4 center, in a conference call with reporters Tuesday.

“I think it makes common sense that you wouldn’t want these to be public knowledge,” he said.

Scott Weaver, a branch professor of pathology, microbiology and immunology, said every facility nationwide that conducts research on infectious agents is required to first have a biological safety committee that includes nonuniversity members of the community to review the research proposal.

“So the community has some assurance just from the way that the internal review process works that the experiments that are going on on campus here are safe, they are not designed to produce biological weapons or anything like that,” he said.

“This is a very important issue and it’s all about balancing the public’s right to know with protecting public safety,” said University of Texas Medical Branch President John Stobo.

“We hope that now that the regional centers of excellence, the Regional Biocontainment Laboratories and the National Biocontainment Laboratories have now been identified, that we can start this discussion debate at a national level using representatives from those entities,” he said.

It is “a critically important issue that goes far beyond UTMB and we need to have a national debate on it,” he said.

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Two Firms Receive Anthrax Vaccine Contracts

The United States awarded contracts this week to two firms to acquire 6 million doses of new anthrax vaccines.  VaxGen Inc. of California received $80.3 million and Avecia Group of Manchester, England, was awarded $71.3 million.

The contracts, issued by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, order each firm to continue development of its version of an improved vaccine and to manufacture 3 million doses.  The contracts keep both companies in the running for an expected $1.4 billion contract to produce and maintain 60 million anthrax vaccine doses by 2013.  That program is envisioned in the Bush administration’s Project BioShield, which has been approved by the U.S. House of Representatives and is now under consideration by the Senate (Bernadette Tansey, San Francisco Chronicle, Oct. 2).

Under the VaxGen contract, the firm will test the vaccine’s efficacy by determining if it protects animals infected with anthrax.  Human studies of the vaccine’s safety began earlier this year and all the volunteers at four locations have received their immunizations (see GSN, May 28).

In a press release, VaxGen said it could manufacture 100 million doses of the bulk vaccine at its existing production facility (VaxGen release, Sept. 30).

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Researchers Hand Over Worldwide Smallpox Study Results

A team of researchers in Washington yesterday delivered the results of a global study on potential drugs to treat the smallpox virus, according to the U.S. Defense Department (see GSN, Feb. 5).

Graham Richards, head of the Oxford University Chemistry Department, presented the results to U.S. and British officials at the British Embassy in Washington.  The study — which included technology partners IBM and United Devices — used the power of 1.3 million personal computers in more than 190 countries.  The computers’ owners donated their idle computers at www.grid.org, to produce an effect more powerful than the world’s 10 largest supercomputers combined, according to the Pentagon.

The study matched 35 million potential drug molecules against eight smallpox proteins in an effort to discover which molecules would bind to the virus.  Results of the study, which have narrowed the field of possible molecules that can be used for smallpox treatment, will also be turned over to the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases and to other governments (U.S. Defense Department release, Sept. 30).

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GAO, Health Advocates Say Health Tracking Will Fight Bioterror

By David McGlinchey
Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — As part of the effort to prepare for a potential bioterrorist attack against the United States, health officials must take steps to better track and monitor public health trends nationwide, a General Accounting Office official said this week (see GSN, Aug. 6).

“Gaps remain in state and local disease surveillance systems, which are essential to public health efforts to respond to disease outbreaks or bioterrorist attacks,” according to Janet Heinrich, GAO director of public health issues, in prepared testimony this week to the House Select Committee on Homeland Security’s Subcommittee on Emergency Preparedness.

According to Heinrich, U.S. health officials must develop an efficient system to quickly move information from local medical workers to national health officials.  Current attempts to monitor health trends, she said, suffer from “chronic underreporting and outdated laboratory facilities.”

“Whether a disease outbreak occurs naturally or due to the intentional release of a harmful biological agent by a terrorist, much of the initial response would occur at the local level, particularly at hospitals and their emergency departments … however, preparedness limitations may impact hospitals’ ability to conduct disease surveillance,” she said.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention earlier this month awarded $4.2 million to 10 state and city governments in an effort to improve medical tracking.

Shelly Hearne, executive director of the nonpartisan group Trust for America’s Health, praised the recent grants and renewed her organization’s call for better health tracking in a statement last week.  While the CDC grant will be split among 10 health agencies — California, Florida, Louisiana, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, New York City, Oklahoma and Wisconsin — Hearne’s organization projects that a comprehensive national health tracking network would cost $275 million annually.

“A robust integrated health tracking network will not only alert health officials to increases and patterns of diseases like asthma,” Hearne said, “it could also pinpoint a surge in illness that might indicate a biological or chemical attack had occurred.”

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FBI Creates Scientific Expert Panel to Aid in Future Bioterrorism Cases

The FBI has created a 35-member panel of scientific experts to develop new techniques for use in bioterrorism investigations, the New York Times reported today (see GSN, Feb. 21).

The panel is part of an effort to advance the new scientific field of microbial forensics, according to the Times.  It consists of U.S. and academic experts in a number of fields such as biology, chemistry and forensics.

“If you want to do a good job, you go to the best,” said Bruce Budowle, a senior FBI scientist and chairman of the panel.  “They see this as an important issue and want to help,” he said (William Broad, New York Times, Sept. 26).

In addition, the United States is also working to develop a network of laboratories that could be used to determine the source of future biological attacks, according to the Baltimore Sun.  The main facility in the network will be the National Bioforesnics Analysis Center, set to be created at Fort Detrick, Md., which will maintain pathogen databases for comparison with agents used in future attacks (Scott Shane, Baltimore Sun, Sept. 26).

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