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Principal Investigator: Craig A Fletcher
Organization: UNIV OF NORTH CAROLINA CHAPEL HILL
Fiscal Year: 2023
Award: $7,916,788
Funding agency: NIH Office of the Director
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.
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