UAMS on Tuesday announced it had received a $7.9 million federal grant to establish a Pandemic Response and Public Health Laboratory and expand its infectious disease research capacity.
The new 9,900-SF lab will be created by renovating an existing space on the first floor of Biomedical Research Center Building One. Plans call for a repurposed atrium, large diagonal hallways, and the conversion of offices to laboratories.
The redesign is expected to begin in mid-2024 and be completed in 2025.
Daniel Voth, chair of microbiology and immunology in the UAMS College of Medicine, is leading the project. He said the grant from the National Institutes of Health will not only help UAMS prepare for future pandemics, it will create new opportunities for collaboration and help recruit new infectious disease researchers.
“While we’ve been able to conduct some great collaborative research on COVID-19, we are also limited because we are so pinched for space,” Voth said in a news release. “We get a number of collaboration requests from other research institutions that we can’t accommodate because we don’t have enough Biosafety Level-3 facility space.”
UAMS has research programs that study tuberculosis, plague, COVID-19 and Q fever, an extremely rare infectious disease transmitted though contact with animals. The renovations will expand those programs and enable new pathogen studies that UAMS said will benefit Arkansas and the global community.
“What really excites me about it is its emphasis on expanding our ability to do safe and secure research on infections,” Shuk-Mei Ho, vice chancellor for research and innovation, said in the release. “The additional capacity will help us get on top of some of the emerging diseases and antibiotic-resistant pathogens, and we can make a big impact on the health of our state.”
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