Infectious diseases and bioterrorism: Catching up with Building 33

When construction began in Nov. 2003 on a $182.6 million integrated laboratory research facility on the Bethesda, Maryland campus of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), administrators knew it would have to be a safe, state of the art facility.

And now, less than six months after opening fully, work on research potentially related to national security is in full swing.

The C.W. Bill Young Center for Emerging and Infectious Diseases – known as Building 33 – has its sights set on infectious diseases and bioterrorism. Researchers must be ready to deal with each, whether they’re naturally occurring or caused by an act of bioterrorism – a real possibility given the events on and since Sept. 11, 2001.

"We cannot become complacent," Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), said at the building's dedication. "This new research center will enable us to conduct important fundamental research and to more vigorously carry out our mission to develop diagnostics, therapeutics and vaccines to protect the American people and the world against significant infectious diseases."

The 150,000 square foot building is a four-story facility that includes biosafety level 2 and 3 (BSL-2 and BSL-3) laboratories and animal care areas, conference rooms and offices.

Principle and Sr. Lab Planner Marc Ferrer, who designed the labs and the vivarium, said new technologies were taken into account in the earliest stages of construction.

"It's not a normal lab building because of containment requirements," Ferrer said. "It’s a BL3 lab, and it has interstitial construction with hepafilters in the ABL3 and BL3 labs. There was also a robotics line put into one of the BL3 labs for drug development."

The project, completed for the NIAID, actually supports eight different laboratory sections within the institute of infectious diseases. The overall size of the building is 150,000 square feet, and the labs probably occupy two-thirds of that, Ferrer said. The animal facility is designed to support rodents, rabbits and primates.

Ferrer said safety considerations were taken into account early on in the planning process.

"The building is designed for the new guidelines for government security so that blast resistance and hardening of the facility was taken into account," he said.

The Center enables NIAID to expand and consolidate research programs including:

• Respiratory viruses such as influenza and avian influenza viruses
• Respiratory bacteria such as multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis and anthrax bacteria
• Insect-borne viruses such as West Nile and dengue viruses
• Immunology of infectious diseases
• Development of vaccines for infectious diseases

The building design remains flexible, Kathryn C. Zoon, Ph.D., director of NIAID’s Division of Intramural Research said. As priorities in infectious disease research change, as they inevitably will, administrators can realign the space allocated to the different research programs located in the facility.