Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson announced Thursday, Sept. 4, the establishment of eight Regional Centers of Excellence for Biodefense and Emerging Infectious Disease Research.

The University of Washington (UW) will lead the WWAMI Regional Center, which will have sites in several locations in the WWAMI area. Samuel I. Miller, UW professor of medicine, microbiology, and genome sciences, will direct the center.

The center will have programs in basic research, education, and training. Grants totaling about $350 million dollars over the next four-and-a-half years will fund the nation’s eight centers. The WWAMI center will receive about $50 million from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

The WWAMI center’s chief goals include developing vaccines, diagnostics, and therapies for specific transmissible bacterial diseases and understanding the pathophysiology of airway infection and inflammation. None of the agents to be studied at the WWAMI Center requires BL-4 containment, the highest biosafety level.

The center will not conduct weapons research. Instead, it will look for ways to protect people through preventive medicine, treatments and countermeasures. Its scientists and labs would assist responders in the event of a biodefense emergency or a major public health crisis from an infectious disease outbreak. The center also will provide training and education to medical students, physicians, and scientists in the five-state WWAMI region.

Among the participating institutions are the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Harborview Medical Center, the Institute for Systems Biology, the Veterans Affairs Puget Sound Health Care System, the University of Idaho in Moscow, and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Hamilton, Mont.

The directors and lead institutions for the other seven regional centers are: Barton Hayes, Duke University; Dennis Kasper, Harvard Medical School; Ian Lipkin, New York State Department of Health; Olaf Schneewind, University of Chicago; Myron Levine, University of Maryland, Baltimore; David Walker, University of Texas Medical Branch (Galveston); and Samuel Stanley, Washington University in St. Louis.

The NIH has funded planning for possible future centers at the University of Iowa and the University of Minnesota.

Details on the nation’s biodefense program are available at this Web site.

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