SBU Lab Receives NIH Funding for Research on Preventing Future Pandemics | | SBU News - Stony Brook News

LCM Facility Will Use $3M of NIH Funding for Equipment and Structural Upgrades

LCM Scientific Director David Thanassi

The Laboratory for Comparative Medicine (LCM) astatine the Renaissance School of Medicine astatine Stony Brook University has received a $3 cardinal assistance from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for installation upgrades and caller instrumentation to enactment precocious probe connected virulent and emerging pathogens.

The assistance was successful effect to a telephone for “Emergency Awards: Biocontainment Facility Improvements and Building System Upgrades to Support Pandemic Preparedness” from the NIAID. The one-time NIH backing allotment volition assistance enactment probe connected the existent COVID-19 pandemic and aboriginal investigations centering connected antiviral programs, antimicrobial approaches and therapeutic measures to forestall oregon mitigate infectious illness outbreaks oregon aboriginal pandemics.

The LCM is engaged successful basic, translational and preclinical probe connected SARS-CoV-2, the viral cause of COVID-19, arsenic good arsenic different infectious agents. During the past 5 years, researchers astatine Stony Brook University person conducted enactment investigating 3 antithetic RNA microorganism families applicable nether the American Pandemic Preparedness efforts. In addition, the LCM is being utilized for probe connected tick-borne pathogens, which are captious to our area, and for studies connected tuberculosis, a planetary infection.

“This grant enables america to marque infrastructure improvements and get caller technological instrumentation to grow our capabilities to execute probe connected highly pathogenic agents,” said David Thanassi, main investigator, technological manager of the LCM, and seat of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology. “This is genuinely a cardinal measurement toward pandemic-preparedness and provides enhanced resources to not lone Stony Brook researchers from aggregate schoolhouse of medicine and different technological departments, but besides authorities and determination investigators moving to combat existent and aboriginal pandemic threats.”

Stony Brook has a agelong past of conducting microbial pathogenesis probe connected emerging pathogens and those that origin communal and wide corruption globally. The LCM is simply a biocontainment installation moving connected a assortment of microbial agents, including viruses and bacteria. Research successful the LCM serves aggregate world investigators and groups, arsenic good arsenic biotechnology companies, some wrong and extracurricular of Stony Brook University.