Share thisI have been an avid reader of the ALN biocontainment column, written by my friend and associate Jon Crane, for more than five years now. I know from my personal experience working with Jon that his recognized leadership in biocontainment stems from over two decades of working on the design of these facilities, a continuous attitude of research and learning, and a commitment to contributing thought leadership to this subject in a way that focuses attention more on others. I myself have had the opportunity to co-write with Jon columns that have appeared here. In my opinion, Jon’s regular columns have provided insightful articles on important biocontainment issues in simple understandable language that have given readers an understanding of the core principles of biocontainment.
As of this issue, I will be writing and working with other experts in the biocontainment community to produce this column for ALN. Jon is no less passionate about biocontainment, but he has taken on new challenges in the global health and research design sphere that mean he has to pass this responsibility on to someone else. The editors at ALN Magazine have graciously accepting my qualifications as Jon’s replacement here. And so I have the privilege of taking over this column, and I will try my best to be a fraction as good as Jon has been at it.
Preparing to produce this column was an opportunity to do some initial reflection on its objectives and how to best communicate information to a broad audience with different starting points. The key objectives for me are to make this column relevant and useful, and to help to foster a dialogue among interested readers. After thinking about this and looking at what made the column successful through to now, I’ve put down a few basic principles and an approach that I hope will serve these objectives. So, without any more setup, here are the ground rules we will apply as best we can for future pieces, until a better approach becomes evident (flexibility is the cornerstone of all good design).
This column should provide you with practical solutions to common containment questions and problems. We will use these design solutions to promote an understanding of the principles of containment. There is a risk of over-simplification when giving a solution to a containment problem as all experienced practitioners know. No solution fits all cases and context means everything here. A host of factors can change what the best design options are. However, as long as we underpin the solutions we discuss with the containment principles they illustrate, you can use the information to help determine what the right options may be for your facility and organization.
We will try to touch on the risk assessment basis behind all biocontainment and biosafety solutions. We design and operate containment facilities based on the particular risks that the pathogens we are working with and way we are working with them pose to people, to animals and to plants. We put in place controls we deem sufficient to reduce these risks, if not to zero, then to acceptable levels. Whether this is a deliberate part of the design process or we are following relevant biosafety guidance documents to make these decisions, our design is based on risk assessment. The BMBL itself is a codified set of facility and practice controls that have evolved through risk assessment, called biosafety levels. The more we incorporate risk assessment in our decision-making process, the more options we create and the more we can be sure that our choices will prove to be effective.
We will promote evidence-based containment design. A lot of our current design practices are based on what has worked in the past but there is exciting new research in applied biosafety and technology development around the world today that we can learn from and evolve our practices with. It is vital to the health of our industry and in the interest of public accountability. Therefore, whenever possible, we will include in our discussion supporting information from these projects and provide references to look at them further if they are relevant to you.