February 23, 2006

By JENNIFER GORE
Contributing Writer

Local activists are reaching out to policy makers to create a citizen oversight committee that will monitor the activities of biosafety labs in the Seattle area.

The Northeast District Council (NEDC), a group that represents more than 20 Seattle neighborhood groups, became aware of what members say are problems with lab regulation when they learned of the University of Washington’s proposal for a Regional Biocontainment Lab in January 2005. Construction of that lab has been placed on indefinite hold due to lack of funding, according to university spokesman Bob Roseth. But that hasn’t stopped the NEDC’s efforts to keep the public eye on biomedical research in the area, especially on level-three containment labs, where serious or lethal microbes are aerosolized (suspended in the air) during testing.

Currently, the University of Washington accounts for 30 of the area’s 36 level-three labs. One of them is the university’s Washington National Primate Research Center in Belltown. Its website, www.wanprc.org, states that the facility focuses on developing treatments for human health problems.

According to John Coulter, executive director of UW’s Health Sciences Administration, the lab is awaiting government approval to move forward with its work on the 1918 Spanish Influenza virus. The center must create an additional level-three facility in order to properly handle the disease, which killed 20 million to 100 million people worldwide in 1918 and 1919.

“ Right now they are working on a piece of the virus which doesn’t require full protection,” says Coulter.

Though the Primate Center isn’t in their part of town, work on deadly diseases like this one has mobilized members of the NEDC. “Reverse genetic engineering like [the resurrection of the Spanish Flu, which had been extinct] has incredible potential for negative surprises,” says NEDC member Kit O’Neill, who represents the Ravenna Springs Community Group.

David Anderson, acting director of the Primate Research Center, states that the facility takes every possible precaution to maintain safety in the labs, including “multiple layers of pre-approval involving occupational health and safety for UW staff, extensive evaluation of all animal-related activities, and scientific evaluation of facilities and budget.”

The NEDC says there are at least six other private institutions in Seattle that manage level-three labs — and since they don’t get funding from the National Institutes of Health, says O’Halloran, NIH guidelines don’t apply.

“ It’s scary to think about,” says activist and web developer Mike McCormick, who recently compiled his research on Seattle biosafety labs into a website, www.labwatch.org. He says it was hard to obtain facts about privately owned labs “primarily because the researchers don’t think it’s in the best interest of the public to release information. Researchers feel the public won’t view the work in the same way they do.”

Privately owned level-three labs in the area include the Seattle Biomedical Research Institute in South Lake Union. The company website, www.sbri.org, indicates that their research staff focuses exclusively on infectious diseases like malaria, HIV, and tuberculosis. Calls to the institute for comment were not returned.

On Feb. 6, the NEDC sent a proposal to the Seattle City Council advocating the creation of a municipal oversight committee comprised of citizens whose responsibility would be to ensure public trust and sound lab practices. Members of the committee would also be unaffiliated with the institution and remain financially independent from the biohazardous research taking place.

The group based their model on the Cambridge Biosafety Committee, which has been in place for three decades and is responsible for reviewing research proposals and developing oversight procedures for labs in Cambridge, Mass.

O’Neill says that “the oversight committee is not in any way meant to cramp biotech activity in the area. We just want to ensure that the labs are operating on a level the community is comfortable with.” 

Anderson believes that the UW already has effective oversight. “It seems reasonable to have the people most familiar with the agents leading the approval and oversight process,” he says.

Though the NEDC is not entirely satisfied with the UW’s oversight, they do recognize the university’s efforts. “The UW is more open and transparent than other groups in the community,” says O’Neill.

“ I’m not so cynical to say that bad research is being done in all these private labs,” says O’Halloran. “But the concern is that we don’t know. When left to wonder, we will assume the worst.” n