Person-centric design and maximum level biosecurity meet in £145 million facility.
Looking out of the window isn’t something most office workers would consider a luxury. But then, most people don’t work in a maximum security, biosafety level 4 high-containment research facility, working to protect the UK’s multi-billion pound agricultural industry from dangerous and highly infectious animal viruses.
For bioimaging expert Jenny Simpson, Bioimaging Research Assistant at The Pirbright Institute, UK, seeing and feeling natural light while checking email away from the microscope is a luxury she thought she’d never enjoy. Neither was a coffee at her desk, because food, drink and high containment don’t really mix.
“The new write-up space outside of the labs is considered as an extension of the canteen, so we are now allowed to eat and drink at the computers,” says Simpson. “It’s a perk that a lot of people like.”
These seemingly trivial treats are some of the many positive changes brought about by her move into the BBSRC National Virology Centre inside the institute’s new £145M Plowright Building — one of the biggest investments in the science infrastructure of the UK bioeconomy for decades which will provide a national capability for research on viruses.
It mixes the hard-edged reality of the type of laboratory that could handle the Ebola virus with the softer, person-centric touches designed to attract and keep the world’s top scientific talent. It’s the newest and most advanced laboratory of its kind — one of only a handful across the globe.
The new award-winning building that Simpson and her colleagues have moved into has taken some brave and bold steps in design. High containment labs are usually buried deep inside a building to keep dangerous elements as far from the outside as possible. Using advances in construction materials and methodology, this new building has the highest levels of containment sealed, but on the outside, letting natural light in. It allows everything from meetings to meals to be almost ‘shared’ between high-containment researchers and other staff in the building, whilst not compromising the absolutely necessary principles of physical separation.
“People hear the word ‘containment’ and imagine a box-within-a-box situation which is the normal working practice,” says Simpson. “I don’t think anyone would imagine the building we have.”
Viral threats
For The Pirbright Institute, which receives strategic funding from UK bioscience funders BBSRC, the new centre is all about staying one step ahead of the world’s top viral threats to animals, as well as those that spread from animals to people. Although in theory the facility could cope with killer human pathogens like Ebola, at Pirbright it’s all about zoonotic diseases that can spread from animals to humans such as flu and the most contagious animal diseases: foot-and-mouth (FMD) disease in cattle; bluetongue in sheep; Marek’s disease in chickens, and lurking threats such as African swine fever virus.
The latter porcine disease is a particular worry. It’s spreading in countries on the periphery of Europe where desperate efforts are being made to contain it. With a 90% mortality rate, if it reaches the West millions of pigs will be slaughtered and the livestock industry will likely be devastated for a decade, costing millions if not billions in lost sales, control measures and compensation.
“The reason for this building to exist is to work on the pathogens that are important right now the world over,” says Dr Michael Johnson, Director of Capability at Pirbright. “It’s also for emerging pathogens. These high level containment facilities are designed to prevent any release of virus to the outside world.
Secure infrastructure is needed for this type of work. To make a new vaccine or diagnostic test, somewhere along the line you have to work with the pathogen itself to obtain genetic material.
It’s a deadly serious business. Outbreaks can lead to the planned culling of millions of animals, as seen during the 2001 FMD epidemic. A National Audit Office report showed the outbreak cost the UK public sector over £3Bn and the private sector more than £5Bn — that’s more than $12.5 billion US dollars today (without even adjusting for inflation; a US outbreak could cost an estimated $50Bn).
Then there is the fight against Marek’s disease in chickens, which today is estimated to cost the poultry industry £1.4Bn per year. Measures against just a single pig disease — porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome virus (PRRSV) — cost the US $560M each year, and more in the EU. That virus appeared from nowhere in 1987, reminding farmers and scientists alike that new deadly animal plagues are anything but fiction.
And to think — these are just a handful of the viruses we face today.
World-class fight
These are staggering figures for the smallest forms of life. And, unfortunately, the battle against these tiny biological particles never ends. Their minute size and short strands of DNA (or RNA, a simpler chemical cousin of DNA) means they can, in theory, out evolve anything we throw at them. Scientists have to be on alert for the next threat and be ready to tackle it.
This is one of the principal reasons behind establishing the new BBSRC National Virology Centre.
“The new facility gives us a state-of-the-art national centre which will act as a show-case for the UK’s world-class science in animal disease,” says Professor Jackie Hunter, CE of institute funders BBSRC. “It will enhance our ability to attract and retain the best scientists and to build international links with other global centres.”
These links with other centres are already well established. Pirbright is designated as the World Reference Laboratory for FMD by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations. This means it accepts samples from veterinarians and scientists all around the world who need samples tested. Pirbright is also a Regional and Community Reference Laboratory for other diseases such as bluetongue in Europe, helping scientists find out which strain of the virus is circulating and which vaccine to use, for example.
“This significant investment was required to maintain and grow our national and international diagnostic capacity for serious animal diseases,” says Hunter. As climate change alters the range and distribution of animal diseases, particularly via the insect vectors that carry them, she says world-class testing facilities are a must, enabling better protection for the UK economy, farmers and the public from the consequences of any disease outbreak.
If it all sounds like a doomsday scenario, it isn’t — it’s a ‘when’, and not an ‘if’ a new epidemic arrives. One would start to worry, but you only have to talk to researchers to realise that, thankfully, they really enjoy this work!
“For me, it’s like being a kid in a sweet shop!” says Dr Simon Carpenter, Head of Entomology in the Vector-borne Diseases Programme at Pirbright. “I have a brand new facility to infect insects and look at how they transmit viruses, which will hopefully give us better predictions on what is threatening the UK and what will threaten us in the future.”
Carpenter says the investment will enable controlled infection of insects with viruses that infect both humans and animals to a degree not possible before in a highly secure environment. And like Simpson, he’s clearly impressed with the new building, which clearly has in mind the people who will work inside it for at least the next 30 years. “We also have to work here and enjoy working here. This provides that combination of being able to do the work while supporting the scientists and making their lives good in the facility.”
No wonder, that since the new development the number of researchers has increased to 350 — double what it was back in 2008 when the new building was still in the planning stages.
Thinking outside of the box
The facility’s architects have taken some bold steps in design and implementation to improve the lives of working scientists like Simpson and Carpenter. For a start, in the high containment areas there are windows. Yes, natural light. Like a coffee and a sandwich at your desk, it’s not something most people would think twice about, but it’s a revelation in the niche working world of biosecurity.
The architects have taken this innovative approach to depart from the ‘box-in-a-box’ thinking that has, until now, dominated high security installations.
“The amount of natural light allowed into the building from the windows is fantastic,” says Simpson. “It allows you to have a connection with the outside world, even if it is just to see what the weather is doing.”
The containment area has been continued into one half of the onsite staff restaurant, as well as in some shared spaces, using a 15ft (4.57m) sealed high glass wall that separates the containment dining area from the general eating area.
Significantly, this dividing glass wall feature also means that high-containment and non-containment staff can still see and interact with each other in meetings or for presentations without researchers having to leave containment. From either side of the divide, video conferencing technology and Skype are used so people can hear each other too — they just can’t come into physical contact.
“The canteen on the inside has changed the way people talk to each other during breaks, and I have noticed that there is more integration of groups,” says Simpson. “There is still the ‘inside outside’ divide, but it is good to see everyone sat in the same place.”
If this sounds like a risky thing to try when people are handling viruses then you’re not the first to wonder. The design engineers wondered too, and came up with a number of solutions to make the site secure.
The key system is that every penetration (wall, window, duct etc.) that goes through the concrete casing of the building can be tested for air leakage without disrupting the overall containment. For this to work, 2182 stainless steel frames were cast into their concrete frames to allow doors, windows and other building parts such as ducts to pass through the containment barrier. And due to an innovative gasket system (better described here), parts and pieces can be replaced or maintained without compromising the long-term air leakage rate.
Preventing air, any air, escaping from the building is the name of the game in containment. The high containment areas are under constant negative pressure — think of constantly sucking in a balloon rather than blowing it up — which means that microbe particles are sucked into the building’s extensive HEPA (High-efficiency Particulate Arrestance) air filters, which are also used in medical facilities and aircraft and homes. (To qualify as HEPA by US Government standards, the filter must remove 99.97% of particles over 0.3 µm.)
On average one HEPA filter air handling unit processes 7 cubic metres of air per second; and according to Pirbright sources all 12 air handling units combined would fill 132 hot air balloons per hour! Throughout the building, over 3000 alarm monitoring units check the system 24/7 and can maintain containment under failure conditions, such as power cuts.
This was so important, that the constructors invested around £1M to construct a fully functioning 1,600 sq ft two-storey mock-up of a typical lab, making sure the system would work and be scalable to the entire building, which stands as tall as six London double-decker buses and has been awarded a medal of technical excellence from the US Department of Homeland Security.
Looking forward, gazing back
This level of investment is needed to make sure that The Pirbright Institute can continue its fight against animal diseases. Seen in reflection of impacts in the 100-year history of science at the site (see Timeline below), it’s not hard to see why the upper echelons of the UK Government and research community committed to the build.
The new Plowright Building is named after Walter Plowright, one of the scientists who took a lead role in rinderpest eradication — only the second time in human history after smallpox that the scourge of a virus has been removed from the planet. Rinderpest was like a bovine Ebola, decimating cattle populations around the world from medieval times and in particular from the 1700s when an estimated 200 million cattle perished. It’s this virus that led to the first mass cattle culls in recorded history (and similar protests, and compensation to allay them) and is the origin of measles in humans.
Pirbright scientists, back when it was called the Institute for Animal Health, played a key role in developing a rinderpest vaccine that would work at room temperature and therefore did not need an unbroken cold-chain infrastructure to keep the vaccines at a low, working temperature. This was the key to vaccinating cattle in the last areas where infections were reported in Somalia, where regional conflicts made operation of a cold chain nigh on impossible.
While scientists were awaiting final confirmation of rinderpest’s demise, a more local threat was averted. Bluetongue disease that mostly strikes sheep, and is endemic in many parts of Europe and beyond, costing rural economies millions in lost productivity, exports and bringing misery to farmers and their flocks. Working with UK Government department Defra and the weather monitoring Met Office, Pirbright researchers predicted that bluetongue would arrive in the UK as favourable winds were poised to blow the virus-carrying midges across the English Channel.
As predicted, the midges arrived and feasted on UK sheep, infecting them with the virus they carried. But the scientists were ready, and the preventative vaccination campaign stopped a major outbreak from spreading further than a handful of English counties. An analysis showed that these actions prevented £460M of losses and saved 10,000 jobs for the UK bioeconomy. (See this Q&A for more; and the end of this feature for a timeline of impacts from Pirbright science.)
The importance of the work is not lost on anyone on site, not least Simpson, who for more than a decade has been making images as beautiful as the viruses are deadly.
“All of the viruses that we work on have huge impacts in one way or another whether it be to industry or agriculture,” she says. “Being able to learn all about the viruses to understand and limit these impacts is hugely beneficial.”
Most people would be terrified of being near a deadly virus, even if it ‘only’ infects animals — a human infection is often a simple mutation away. But Simpson admits a lightly morbid, CSI-like interest in forensics actually drew her to the role. And of course, there’s always the prospect of being first.
“The general day to day running of a laboratory is not that exciting — ordering stock, making solutions,” she says. “But knowing that more often than not, you are one of a few people — sometimes even the first — to have seen something down the microscopes is pretty exciting!”
She hopes the building attracts people to come and work at the institute, and the signs are that this is already happening.
“I don’t think the structure should be the main focus on attracting new people to the institute though. The equipment housed inside and the techniques carried out should be used to full advantage,” she says, pausing. “Especially the microscopes, but then I’m biased!”
Timeline
