Medical marijuana center opens doors.

ceeding $150 million. Then come the operating expenses. When Feldmann began directing Health Canada’s BSL-4 lab in Winnipeg, Manitoba, he was cautioned by C. J. Peters to keep his operating funds separated from his research funds. While at USAMRIID, Peters went through a cold winter and the heating bill ate up much of the lab’s money. Unless a laboratory has long-term research goals and government support, like UTMB, said Feldmann, many entities considering building and operating a BSL-4 facility will find the costs prohibitively high. The University of California at Davis is one of a handful of finalists bidding to win a grant for an NIH-funded highcontainment lab, and Murphy says that work at the Davis facility will focus on a mix of diagnostics and research, such as vaccine development. The researchers will also study therapies designed to ameliorate the biochemical cascades triggered within the body by viral disease. Pharmaceutical companies long ago gave up on research involving these viruses, finding them too expensive to study with too little potential for profit. But Murphy says that September 11 changed everything and pharmaceutical companies started expressing interest once the federal funding faucets started flowing. Researchers also feel that while the funding was made available for bioterrorism response, there will be a public health payoff in an increased capacity to deal with emerging viruses. “Many of the pathogens have not received biomedical interest in recent years, so there is a lot to do,” said Murphy. “And to be able to do research, and then switch over to diagnostics during an emergency, is what our country needs.”