Location: Operations
Project Number: 3022-32000-016-000-D
Project Type: In-House Appropriated
Start Date: May 4, 2023
End Date: May 3, 2028
Objective:
Objective 1. House highly technical equipment for monitoring and controlling building access, building air flow and critical scientific instrumentation. Hire capable and trained staff to support this sophisticated infrastructure.
Objective 2. Hire staff who are trained and capable of maintaining strict biosecurity, maintaining all systems for autoclaving and sterilizing experimental and building waste to ensure decontamination. Research conducted in NBAF will use agents with considerable risk to animal and human health if handled improperly.
Approach:
The goal of National Program 103 (NP 103), Animal Health, is to protect and ensure the safety of the Nation’s agriculture and food supply through improved disease detection, prevention, and control. Basic and applied research approaches will be applied to solve animal health problems of high national priority.
The National Bio and Agro Defense Facility (NBAF) will take over the mission of the Plum Island Animal Disease Center (PIADC) and be the ARS lead facility for Foreign Animal Disease research. Furthermore, it will add new capabilities not found at PIADC. It will be the first facility in the United States with large animal capacity with biosafety level 4 (BSL4) containment capability. Further it will house a Biologics Development Module (BDM), an essential facility for scaling up research trials beyond initial laboratory scale experiments, to attract pharmaceutical companies to participate in further development of diagnostics, therapeutics and medical counter measures to foreign animal and particularly zoonotic diseases.
NBAF will 1) provide solutions to problems associated with the control, eradication, and recovery of foreign and emerging diseases, and 2) maintain a portfolio of expertise that will allow ARS to rapidly respond to new and unforeseen disease threats.
