DEFENSE

A national center to assist Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials and the country in the fight against bioterrorism has been established at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The Biodefense Knowledge Center (BKC) was officially dedicated today during a visit to Livermore by DHS Under Secretary for Science and Technology Charles McQueary. “Biodefense is a complex problem. The new center will integrate what we know about biodefense and work to anticipate and respond to bioterrorist attacks,” said the new center's director, LLNL biomedical engineer Bill Colston. The BKC will draw upon about 75 researchers based at four national laboratories — Oak Ridge, Pacific Northwest, Sandia and Lawrence Livermore. Collaborators will also include three DHS University Centers of Excellence — at the University of Minnesota, the University of Southern California and Texas A&M University. The new biodefense center will serve a number of functions. The BKC will provide a 24 hours per day, 7 days a week capability for assistance about bioterrorism. Initially, the center will provide assessments and respond to information requests from the DHS Operations Center, although other federal agencies may be able to use the center as a resource in the future . The center has already been called into action. In July, the BKC responded within 24 hours to a DHS request for an assessment about reports that foot and mouth disease had killed dozens of people in Balochistan, a province in southwestern Pakistan. Noting that foot and mouth disease rarely infects humans and assessing other features of the reported outbreak, the BKC concluded that the more likely cause of the deaths was a different virus that had caused other deaths reported in the area. Another function of the BKC will be to integrate many different types of information about biodefense. Among the data to be collected are the genome sequences for pathogens of concern, the existence and location of vaccines, the location of agent sequences for bioforensic attribution, as well as information about individuals, groups, or organizations that might be developing these pathogens. “The BKC integrates biodefense knowledge gathered from all around the world, from international databases to subject matter experts, with an emphasis on privacy and security,” Colston said. “The result will be a centralized and trusted information sharing and analysis system: a one-stop shop for assessing bioterrorism threats.” A third function of the new biodefense center is that as part of Project Bioshield, federal legislation adopted earlier this year, the center will prepare threat assessments about potential bioterrorism attacks for DHS. These threat assessments will consider the operational and technical feasibility of possible attacks with various select agents and estimate the number of people who could potentially be exposed. The major goal of these assessments is to help the Department of Health and Human Services prioritize acquisition of biological countermeasures such as vaccines and antibiotics for responding to a terrorist incident. These assessments will also help identify research gaps that need to be closed. For example, information on the lethality of a given select agent may be unknown and require further research. The BKC will leverage the network of scientists and technologists who work on the biodefense problem. “The subject matter experts will be available to participate in assessment efforts,” Colston said. “In the longer term, we want to provide those researchers with tools and connect the different scientists with each other.” Among the center’s researchers will be intelligence and biological analysts, information technology experts, bioinformatics specialists, as well as modeling and simulation experts. The BKC will have a budget of about $12 million implemented with its four national laboratory members for the current fiscal year. A subcontractor, Science Applications International Corp., will support the center. The BKC will be a member of a nationwide group of organizations known as the Homeland Security Biodefense Complex. The complex includes the three University Centers of Excellence as well as the National Bioforensic Analysis Center and Biological Threat Characterization Center in Frederick, Maryland, and the Plum Island Animal Disease Center in Plum Island, New York.