By Lorena Infante Lara
The Vanderbilt University Medical Center has received $8 million in funding from the National Institutes of Health and has allotted an additional $4 million to establish a new biosafety level 3 laboratory on campus. This funding was possible thanks in large part to the efforts of Eric Skaar, director of VI4—the Vanderbilt Institute for Infection, Immunology and Inflammation—as well as the VUMC Office of Research.
Biosafety levels in the U.S. are assigned to laboratories based on the type of precautions that researchers must take to safeguard their health from biological agents and range from BSL-1 to BSL-4.
The lowest biosafety level requires just basic hand washing before and after doing laboratory work, for example, while the highest biosafety level demands intense protections such as full-body suits, airlocks, and chemical and personal showers upon exit from the lab.
The new BSL-3 space on campus will allow researchers to work with agents that can cause serious and potentially lethal disease. Vanderbilt currently has two BSL-3 labs that are assigned to the labs of specific faculty members, but the new space will be available—after appropriate approvals and training—to the VI4 community, which includes several primary and secondary Basic Sciences faculty.
A handful of researchers are already lined up to expand their current work at the BSL-3 facility when it opens in the spring of 2025. Their research focuses on a wide array of bacterial and viral pathogens such as fully virulent Bacillus anthracis (the bacterium that causes anthrax), Mycobacterium tuberculosis, SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19), and emerging viruses such as Zika, hantavirus, Marburg virus, and Ebola.
“This is a big win for VI4, Vanderbilt, and our region,” Skaar said. “The lab won’t just be a research facility; it has the potential to serve as an emergency-use facility in Nashville in the event that there is some sort of outbreak, pandemic, or even a biological attack somewhere in the region.”
Although some labs on campus provided diagnostic development and therapeutic testing during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, those labs are not equipped for certain types of infectious agents. The new facility will provide additional flexibility and capacity for response to COVID-19 and beyond.