NIH Continues Bio-Safety Building Boom with Construction of $105 Million Integrated Research Facility at Fort Detrick

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Researched by Industrialinfo.com (Industrial Information Resources, Incorporated; Houston, Texas). Founded in 1887, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) (Bethesda, Maryland) has evolved into our nation's focal point for medical research. Basically, the NIH and its 27 individual institutes study everything that affects our health, from the common cold to viruses most deadly. One of the NIH's institutes is the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).

The NIAID's focus is to conduct and support biomedical research into the treatment and ultimately the prevention of the almost innumerable infectious, immunologic, and allergic diseases that threaten people worldwide. The NIAID's division of Intramural Research currently operates campuses in two states, Maryland and Montana, and the sites in both states are growing through almost $200 million in construction projects, as reported by Industrialinfo.com on April 13, 2005 Montana's Biotech Cowboys Wield Microscopes as They Lasso Deadly Germs and over $120 Million in Capital Projects.

The NIAID has tapped Gilbane to serve as construction manager for the $105 million Integrated Research Facility (IRF) at Fort Detrick, Maryland. Designed by Jacobs Engineering of Arlington, Virginia, the IRF will be a 100,000 square foot building with laboratory space for animal research, radiology equipment, mechanical space, and a waste-handling area. There will also be Biosafety Levels 2, 3, and 4 (BSL-2, BSL-3, and BSL-4) laboratory suites, each offering variable levels of protection to researchers and the environment from the pathogens being studied.

NIAID scientists will focus on organisms that cause a variety of infectious diseases and offer the potential to be used as agents of bioterrorism. Those diseases under study currently include the plague, Lyme disease, rabies, tick-borne encephalitis, West Nile virus disease, influenza, anthrax infection, Ebola virus hemorrhagic fever, HIV, tuberculosis, transmissible spongiform encephalopathy, and Q fever.

The site at Fort Detrick, which is home to the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID), was chosen for a variety of reasons, including being able to utilize the existing USAMRIID research facilities and infrastructure and the ready availability of researchers experienced in infectious diseases related to biodefense and other emerging infections. USAMRIID has decades of experience in research similar to what will be conducted at the IRF when it is completed in 2007.

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