University of Chicago receives biosafety funds

CHICAGO -- Detecting and preventing anthrax, smallpox and other bioterror agents will be one goal of a regional high-security biosafety laboratory to be built in suburban Chicago, officials announced Tuesday.\nThe University of Chicago said it is getting $17 million in federal funds to build the laboratory at Argonne National Laboratory, southwest of Chicago near Lemont.\nThe biosafety laboratory will be one of nine regional centers and two national centers announced by the National Institutes of Health.\nThomas Rosenbaum, University of Chicago's vice president for research, said the regional lab "will help transform the Midwest into a center for microbiology research."\nThe university runs Argonne for the U.S. government.\nThe government will spend $120 million each for the two national labs, to be built at Boston University and the University of Texas.\n"These awards to build high-level biosafety facilities are a major step toward 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 and West Nile virus," said Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson.\nThe goal will be "rapid translation of basic findings into real products," said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of NIH's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.\nThe University of Chicago expects to acquire an additional $13 million from other sources to complete the regional lab. It will be called the Howard T. Ricketts Laboratory, named after the university researcher who was involved with the discovery of organisms that cause typhus and Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever.\nStringent guidelines for design, construction and operations will protect those who work in the lab and live nearby, university officials said.\nEnvironmental studies assessing the lab's potential local impact will be done before construction begins and are expected to take at least nine months. Groundbreaking likely would occur no earlier than spring 2005.\nThe other regional laboratories will be located in Alabama, Colorado, Louisiana, Missouri, New Jersey, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee.