Scientists searching for ways to protect the public from bioterrorism and potentially deadly pathogens gathered in St. Louis last week for a national meeting of the 10 Regional Centers of Excellence for Biodefense and Emerging Infectious Diseases (RCE). The Midwest Regional Center of Excellence (MRCE), a multi-institutional research center anchored at the University, hosted the meeting.
In welcoming the 325 scientists in attendance, Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton noted that U.S. support for research to develop vaccines and treatments for severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), avian flu, anthrax, the plague and other infectious diseases has a global reach.
“Investing in these areas of research will prove to be important for this country and the rest of the world,” he said.
While biotechnology holds tremendous promise for curing emerging infectious diseases, it also carries the risk of being misused, cautioned Stewart A. Baker, U.S. Department of Homeland Security assistant secretary for policy, in his keynote address.
“It’s not a question of if — of course biotechnology is going to fall into the wrong hands,” he said.
He predicted that the biotechnology revolution would follow the same path as the information technology revolution 20 years ago. As information technology became faster, cheaper and more accessible, computer viruses and fraud became commonplace. But with biotechnology, the consequences of the world’s deadliest germs falling into the wrong hands are likely to be catastrophic.
“We have to think about how we’ll respond to these types of challenges before they happen,” he added.
Among the WUSTL scientists presenting research at the meeting were William Goldman, Ph.D., and David Wang, Ph.D.
Goldman, professor of molecular microbiology, has developed a mouse model of pneumonic plague and demonstrated that mice lacking a key enzyme have a tempered response to the bacteria that cause the disease.
Wang, an assistant professor of molecular microbiology and of pathology and immunology, has developed a viral gene chip as a tool to detect thousands of known viruses as well as novel viruses. While at the University of California, he used the chip to successfully identify the SARS virus.
“Recruiting the nation’s best scientists to the RCE program has changed the scientific landscape for tackling bioterrorism and emerging diseases,” said Samuel L. Stanley Jr., M.D., vice chancellor for research and director of the MRCE. “It is my hope that collaborations that come from this meeting will lead us closer to developing novel treatments.”
Also attending the meeting were two senior officials from the National Institutes of Health: Michael Kurilla, M.D., Ph.D., director of the Office of Biodefense Research Affairs (OBRA), and Rona Hirschberg, Ph.D., senior program officer for OBRA.