Fed grants UW $50 million for biodefense

In a move to protect the United States from potential acts of bioterrorism, the federal Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has selected UW as the lead institution for one of eight Regional Centers of Excellence for Biodefense and Emerging Infectious Diseases.

The award will delegate approximately $50 million over the next four-and-a-half years for the UW, which has a long history of excellence in the study of infectious diseases.

"The UW is and has been one of the top places in the world to do research (on infectious diseases)... This area of research has always been a point of strength -- certainly for the past 30 or 40 years," said Samuel I. Miller, professor of medicine, microbiology and genome sciences, and the chief investigator of the project.

The UW will investigate the bacteria Yersinias pestis (plague), Francisella tularensis (tularemia), and Burkholderia (melioidosis), according to Miller. While all the named agents have been considered potential weapons of biological warfare, none of the diseases require Bio-Safety Level four (BSL-4) containment -- the highest biosafety level.

"The handling of infectious agents is a common and carefully managed research area, with which the UW is very familiar," said Karen VanDusen, director of environmental health and safety.

The planned research is aimed at defending the country from the bacteria, not to develop it as a weapon.

As part of the grant's federally mandated protocol, there will be additional security requirements -- including mandatory FBI background checks and fingerprinting for all researchers involved in the project, as well as heightened facility requirements such as identification and check-in procedures. VanDusen said the FBI background checks in particular are a very new element in research requirements for the University.

"In the wrong hands, the agents could be used as weapons of mass destruction, so we must protect both researchers and the research itself," said VanDusen. "The researchers do indeed take protection very seriously, and likewise the new security requirements."

This year, Congress allotted $5.9 billion of the $37.7 billion Department of Homeland Security budget to bioterrorism. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), is responsible for administering the biodefense research grant program.

Miller submitted the grant application to the NIAID Jan. 15. Of 13 applications considered for the grants, eight were funded, according to Rona Hirschberg, NIAID senior program officer.

"Every application submitted was strong," said Hirschberg. "However, the institutions selected for funding were outstanding in every category."

The criteria for selection included significance of planned research, reasonableness of technical approach, reputation and credibility of investigators, environment of institution, and innovation. The qualifications of the principal investigator were particularly important, said Hirschberg. Decisions were based primarily on peer review of scientists within the field.

UW chief investigators have a history of excellence in their respective fields. Miller, who has been studying bacteria since 1987, came to UW from Harvard in 1995. In April, he led a team of UW researchers to the discovery of a cell-signaling system that causes pseudomonas aeruginosa, a common source of deadly lung infections for patients of cystic fibrosis.

Maynard Olson, director of the UW Genome Center and one of the founders of the Human Genome Project, is also a mainstay to the program. The recent completion of human genetic code, announced by Olson in April on the 50th anniversary of the discovery of DNA, is expected to greatly aid the study of the deadly bacteria.

Other local institutions participating in the Washington, Wyoming, Alaska, Montana and Idaho Regional Center of Excellence (WWAMI) include Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Harborview Medical Center, the Institute for Systems Biology and the VA Puget Sound Health Care System. The University of Idaho in Moscow and the Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Hamilton, Mont. will also contribute to WWAMI.

The other regional centers will be located at Duke, Harvard, New York State Department of Health, University of Chicago, University of Maryland-Baltimore, University of Texas-Galveston and Washington University in St. Louis. The total of all regional center grants is $350 million.