UNC BSL3 Core Facility

PROJECT SUMMARY / ABSTRACT: The central goal of this project is to construct a 10,000 square feet biosafety level 3 (BSL3) research laboratory core facility to promote readiness to respond to future pandemics. Infectious diseases pose a severe and increasing threat to human health, especially in communities that lack access to health care. UNC programs will

soon exceed current infrastructure capacity due to increase demand. A strategic review of our microbial pathogenesis and infectious disease community concluded that urgent action was essential to support the high containment programs. Among the barriers to the growth of research was a lack of access to critical technologies

and animal space within the existing BSL3 laboratories. This transformative BSL3 core facility will allow UNC to expand to meet current and projected research needs in the UNC School of Medicine, School of Pharmacy, and Gillings School of Global Public Health. UNC has engaged multiple stakeholders across the research community

to design and construct a centralized BSL3 suite to characterize the immune responses to coronavirus and other emerging viral pathogens and learn about what drives immune response, disease progression, and protection against future infection. The proposal will attain four objectives: 1. Design and construct a high containment

facility to bring investigators working on emerging and re-emerging infections together; 2. Enable access to specialized instrumentation including aerobiology and imaging equipment for supporting high containment research; 3. Create institution-wide core space to allow recruitment of new investigators to the infectious disease

research community by increasing usable laboratory space in the BSL3 facility and purchasing new equipment that will serve investigators within the many UNC centers, institutes, and departments and their nationwide collaborators; 4. Enhance UNC's ability to lead the rapid response generating new therapeutics and vaccines to

save lives on a local, national, and even global level.