$22 million federal award to fund new lab for vaccine research

The University of Louisville has received a federal grant of nearly $22 million to build a research lab geared to developing new vaccines to fight bioterrorism and emerging infectious diseases, officials announced Sept. 7, 2005.

The award from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health, will allow the university to create the Center for Predictive Medicine, a facility that will join a growing number of Level 3 Regional Biosafety Labs being built across the nation.

UofL applied in December 2004 to create the center.

"We're pleased that we've been chosen to play a part in this important national public health effort," said UofL president James Ramsey, Ph.D.

A dozen UofL scientists are working to determine which genes and proteins keep infectious diseases out of our bodies and which genes and proteins let them in.
Eugenia Wang, for example, is studying the flu virus, while Yousef Abu Kwaik is exploring how Legionnaire's disease invades the body.

The center, which will be roughly 45,000 square feet in size and will be built on a 4.2-acre tract at the northeast corner of UofL's Shelby Campus, will allow researchers to do their work in a state-of-the-art facility that will be designed and built according to rigorous safety standards. The lab's top-of-the-line facilities and new technologies will help researchers ramp up their efforts to find ways of fighting infectious diseases.

The projected move-in date is August 2009.

Regional biosafety labs are being built at nine universities: Colorado State University at Fort Collins, the University of Chicago, University of Missouri at Columbia, Duke University, Tulane University, University of Alabama at Birmingham, University of Pittsburgh, University of Tennessee at Memphis and the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey at Newark.