High-Tech AIDS Research Center Designed to Keep Virus on Inside
Grand opening ceremonies at the Medical Biology Institute’s “biocontainment laboratory” in La Jolla were scheduled to begin in just hours, so workers were hurrying Thursday afternoon to complete work on the first facility in the nation specifically designed for extensive research on animals infected with the deadly virus that causes AIDS.
The unique blend of high-tech equipment will keep researchers in the laboratory from being infected with the virus. Everything, from the lab’s floor plan to the air-conditioning system, has been designed to keep the research animals--and the virus--on the inside.
Researchers around the nation have been hampered by the lack of secure facilities where they can experiment with large numbers of animals that have been injected with the deadly HIV virus that causes AIDS. The nonprofit institute’s 5,000-square-foot laboratory has been designed to accommodate research experiments involving hundreds of HIV-infected mice.
The National Institutes of Health funded construction of the $1.2-million laboratory to advance what one federal researcher described as the institute’s “imaginative AIDS research” programs. The laboratory is the first of a several around the country that will be completed through National Institutes of Health funding.
Preliminary research being conducted at the institute in La Jolla had “reached a point where, to proceed further, it was necessary to infect large numbers of mice with HIV for a large-scale study,” according to Dr. Charles Carter, director of the National Institutes of Health’s Bethesda, Md.-based Research Facilities Improvement Program. “Such a study requires the highly controlled environment of a (secure) laboratory.”
Doors leading into the laboratory area are specially constructed to work in concert with an expensive system that prevents air from leaving the laboratory. The system is designed to push air through an elaborate air filtration system capable of trapping seemingly infinitesimal particles.
Even the cages that soon will house laboratory animals have been specially constructed--as is the machine used to wash those cages. All of the building’s nooks and crannies have been filled with epoxy to prevent air from escaping.
Once in the high-tech laboratory, scientists will follow elaborate research guidelines established by the National Institutes of Health. They will take special precautions, such as donning special laboratory clothing and masks. After working in the secure portion of the laboratory, researchers will exit through showers that will kill bacteria and viruses.
The safety procedures make it possible for the institute’s scientists to pursue novel research that involves the transfer of portions of the human immune system into “severe combined immunideficient mice,” according to an institute spokesman.
Because the specially bred mice have no immune system of their own, the transplant procedure produces a breed of mice that provides a convenient way to test various treatments for AIDS. Researchers already know that the specially bred mice will contract AIDS.
Researchers will study the disease’s progression in the mice and try to determine if new drugs and therapies have any effect upon them.
