Roberto Trujillo helped create the first
advanced laboratory in Mexico for the study of HIV and other viruses.With support from faculty and staff of the Harvard School of Public Health, a Mexican university has built the first laboratory in that country where researchers can closely and safely scrutinize HIV and other deadly viruses, some of which threaten the U.S.
Inaugurated in February, the biosafety level 3 lab at the University of Nuevo León in Monterrey will allow Mexican scientists to study the AIDS virus at concentrations hundreds of times higher than those found in specimens from patients. "It used to be that this BL-3-type work had to be done in the U.S., which was very expensive for Mexican researchers," says Roberto Trujillo, an instructor at HSPH and a native of Mexico. "Having their own BL-3 laboratory will make it much more economical."
Roberto Trujillo helped create the first
advanced laboratory in Mexico for the study of HIV and other viruses.
Trujillo, along with Max Essex, chairman of the Harvard AIDS Institute and the Mary Woodard Lasker professor of health sciences at HSPH, and Mary Frances McLane, lab manager at the Harvard AIDS Institute, advised the Mexicans on the design of the lab, modeled in part on Harvard's own facility, and helped train its staff. Reyes Taméz Guerra, president and head of immunology of the University of Nuevo León, and Cristina Rodríguez Padilla, chief of the new lab visited HSPH during planning, and Padilla stayed for two months to review safety procedures and guidelines. Staff exchanges for training and scientific collaboration will continue between HSPH and the University of Nuevo León, one of a half dozen universities worldwide that collaborate closely with HSPH through an NIH Fogarty grant.
Presidential Praise
Officials in the federal government and the state of Nuevo Leon are excited about the new facility, which is the most advanced of only three BL-3 labs in all Latin America, Trujillo says, adding, "The support we have from the president and the governor is incredible." Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo attended the inaugural celebration, which featured a three-day scientific symposium with talks by eminent virus researchers including Essex, Joseph Brain of HSPH, Robert Gallo of the University of Maryland, Baltimore, and Mark Wainberg of McGill University, president of the International AIDS Society.
Highly concentrated virus is needed for certain types of research such as characterizing genomic differences among viral strains. The aerosols produced by these materials can pose infectious hazards if conditions are not rigorously controlled.
In a BL-3 lab, scientists work under hoods that remove and filter contaminated air. The entire facility is on a gradient that moves air from less contaminated to more contaminated areas, with a required number of circulations per hour of fresh air. Rooms are sealed tightly at the joints so that no liquids can escape or get trapped in cracks.
"Before the new lab was built, there were a lot of young scientists there who seemed to be doing good research with surrogate viruses such as bovine immunodeficiency virus," says Essex. "You can address some of the same questions that way as with HIV, but obviously you can't do it very completely or directly."
The lab is expected to serve as a resource for the entire country, Trujillo says. Other virology labs in Mexico will benefit because research preparations can be made in the BL-3 lab with live virus, which is then killed before being shipped out for use in labs that do not have the facilities to work with concentrated live virus.
The lab's precise role in national AIDS control efforts has not yet been determined. But one important function could be surveillance of the epidemic in Mexico. Highly virulent strains of the virus, moving rapidly through populations in Asia and Africa, have not spread widely in North America, but Essex says it is only a matter of time. If the epidemic begins to accelerate in a particular region, the lab will make it possible to detect any new HIV strains that may be responsible.
Besides HIV, the facility will likely be used to study pathogens including hepatitis viruses and a Venezuelan encephalitis virus that has made its way through central America to Mexico and the southern U.S.
--Tom Reynolds