Part I of this series discussed biosafety and program management considerations, strategic planning issues, and a biosafety planning methodology for implementing design solutions for multi-pathogen, multi-use, multi-protocol containment facilities. Part II, which features planning, design, and technical criteria, cites three case studies: the Canadian Science Centre for Human and Animal Health, the Pirbright Site Redevelopment Project in the United Kingdom, and the University of Florida Pathogen Research Facility.

Many BSL-3 and BSL-4 facilities struggle with high overhead costs, equipment that is dedicated specifically for small programs, and insufficient flexibility. As a result, financial backers are seeking more value for their money by scaling up facilities, merging multiple programs into one facility, sharing expensive equipment, and making buildings flexible enough to accommodate future changes. Many of these goals can be achieved by properly designing and constructing multi-use buildings that can accommodate a wide range of research, contain numerous pathogens, and house multiple species.

The multi-use facilities offer a better return on investment by providing higher levels of integration, accommodating larger research programs, achieving a critical mass of science with multiple smaller programs, and requiring lower overhead costs for maintenance, utilities, and other services.

There are two obvious downsides to merging programs and bolstering flexibility. First, building sufficient flexibility into a facility requires substantial upfront costs. Secondly, bringing a critical mass of scientists together to share equipment and to collaborate on research increases the likelihood that something will go wrong since more people are involved.

“Planning the facility correctly will result in high value and increase the success of a very complex, multi-user facility,” says Randy Kray, director of high containment planning and design at CUH2A in Atlanta.

Defining Barriers

Defining the barriers and transitions from one space to another makes a containment facility planner’s job easier. It is important to make these distinctions at the beginning of the planning process to ensure that all key players are aware of where the barriers will be located, where they can be crossed by which means.

“Have your designers and planners map out all of the protocols with your scientists and your safety officers to create a method of communication so that everyone understands the use of the facility, as well as the bricks and mortar and engineering systems,” advises Kray. “It is really essential to marry your protocols with the design. We have heard about the advancement in containment technology and the increased experience of designers and architects in terms of these buildings, but we can’t let that expertise create a process that divorces itself from the scientists and the people operating and managing the facility.”

A mapping system for personnel protocols is an effective tool during the planning of multi-use areas. It serves to establish buy-in between the users and the safety team and helps to balance the physical structure, engineering controls, and barrier protocol aspects of biocontainment. For the Pirbright Project, Ross Ferris of Smith Carter and the design team developed a flexible biosafety language to overlay the protocols with the planning concepts. The method can be adopted to map all barrier transitions and is being used extensively on other projects since its success on that project.

The mapping system details the type of personal protective equipment that should be added, removed, or changed at each point of a barrier in the facility, ranging from gloves and eye protection to an air-pressure resistant suit. It also specifies the location of valuable safety amenities, such as showers, hand wash areas, and disinfectant materials.

“We developed a nomenclature of whether the protocol involved adding, changing, decontaminating, moving, or testing any part of the biosafety process,” says Kray. “The mapping system is a living language that involves gathering input from users about what the proper protocols should be and testing the design against these.”

High-Containment Typologies

The choice of an overall design concept will impact the success of a multi-use, complex building program. There are many strategies or approaches that can be used to combine different levels of containment and various types of multi-user spaces. The typologies include compact, heart, and campus.

Compact Typology

The compact typology is considered one of the most prevalent because it is the most efficient and inherently cost-effective. The location of an urban site might force the use of this design approach due to less land to develop on, but many projects are simply driven by the economics of compactness and vertically stacked spaces. The approach offers advantages in terms of the ability to create flexibility and change the amount of space available for a program.

However, there are also challenges related to delineating barriers or boundaries of the zones. Delineation of users and different protocols must be signaled in ways other than the architecture. Another downside to the compact approach is that it does not promote collaboration or interaction among users. These challenges must be taken into consideration during the planning and design for a multi-use high-containment building.

“It’s difficult to create interaction because it is more of a homogenous system and there really isn’t a place where everyone goes,” notes Kray.

Heart Typology

This containment typology, on the other hand, is more successful at promoting planned and spontaneous collaboration with an interaction zone for eating, meeting, working, and socializing. It also provides segregation of programs and protocols with the ability to create different elements and to build for the users’ specific needs.

The Pirbright Site Redevelopment Project in the United Kingdom is an example of a heart concept with centralized services and shared core technologies. There are barrier divisions to separate users and protocols. Upon completion in 2010, the 140,000-sf modernization project will consolidate the research programs of the Institute for Animal Health (IAH) and the Veterinary Laboratories Agency’s (VLA) Virology Department.

“It is a refurbishment of the existing vesicular disease program with the addition of programs to research the avian flu and rabies,” says Kray. “It has a common central focus space and a series of different agency spaces that have different kinds of flexibilities for expansion and contraction, as well as core amenities. It combines both strictly animal pathogens and zoonotic disease research and is, therefore, quite complex in the goals of its multi-use program.”

The central common space will be utilized for collaboration, food service, and write-up work. This area is part inside, part outside the containment barrier and brings the scientists together in all components of their research activity. The wings of the building are designed into four T-quadrant zones that relate to maintenance, operation, and program separation needs. They can also easily facilitate two to four separate programs through anterooms and air pressure zones. The wings can be further articulated with the higher risk space at the rear of the floor so individuals who do not work in these areas do not have to enter this zone, simplifying their protocols.

The modular approach allows for changing configurations from Risk Space 1 (RS1) classification to Risk Space 2 or Risk Space 3. Therefore, the human pathogen research and animal environmental concerns can easily be mapped into the wings and separated as needed. The IAH, a world leader on infectious diseases of livestock, uses a scale to show levels of risk spaces. RS1 focuses on open-plan labs for small animals and poultry, and a lab coat is required when working in this area. RS2 pertains to labs with Class II biological safety cabinets and the use of gowns and gloves as protective equipment, while RS3 involves labs with Class II or Class III safety cabinets and requires more heavy-duty protective gear.

The University of Florida Pathogen Research Facility, currently in the advanced schematics phase, is also designed around the heart concept. The 108,000-sf multidisciplinary facility in Gainesville will focus on emerging human, plant, and animal pathogens. Containment labs will be broken into pods on multiple floors. It will include modular BSL-3E suites and flexible multi-use of modular procedure rooms within the suite concept.

“We have containment programs per each research floor with a two-suite concept to allow separation with the proper protocol space on each side,” says Kray. “The suites are designed for a great deal of flexibility to accommodate different kinds of research. It is being fit out for the ability to have a wide band of research, including environmental chambers for plant pathogen research and the ability to conduct insect work inside containment. The lab design has to be very flexible because everyone needs to use these rooms differently.”

Campus Typology

“The historic approach to multi-pathogen, multi-use facilities, especially on a larger scale, is the campus where you have a series of discreet elements that surround a common space,” says Kray. “This is great for separating the protocols and knowing that you are moving from one building to another and changing how you operate, but it is difficult to bring people together. It is difficult to share space and have programs working in a flexible manner.”

The physical separation of facilities makes it easy to distinguish between different protocols and research programs. The structures can also be built to accommodate the changing needs of multiple users.

Despite its positive aspects, the campus approach can be more difficult to manage and more expensive to operate. There is also a greater likelihood of underutilization with this type of design layout.

The 315,000-sf Canadian Science Centre in Winnipeg, Manitoba, is a flagship of multi-use, multi-pathogen research. The facility, completed in 1997, houses the Canadian Food Inspection Agency’s National Centre for Foreign Animal Disease and Health Canada’s National Microbiology Laboratory. It includes multiple levels of biocontainment, including BSL-2, BSL-3, BSL-3 Ag, and BSL-4 and was the first major facility in North America to combine human and agricultural pathogen research.

It represents a compact campus design concept organized around a common internal core of shared amenities. However, the institutional segregation for users and functions permits only minimal sharing of space.

“They do have interaction and great collaboration, but there is no shared program space, which impacts on the flexibility. That has been an issue in terms of programs that need more space and the inability to shift programs around,” says Kray.

Planning Concepts to Facilitate Multi-Use

In addition to the overall design concept, developing the appropriate planning model plays a major role in facilitating the use of multi-pathogens, multi-protocols in your facility. In animal research facilities, three planning concepts to consider are the linear concept, the twin concept, and the pod concept. Each has its own advantages and disadvantages in promoting safety and flexibility in the multi-use context. The linear concept, for example, is flexible in how much space to allocate a given pathogen or experiment and can often accommodate the future expansion of programs. However, it is difficult to isolate programs without adding more elaborate protocols for sharing the common circulation areas.

The linear concept is based on the traditional central corridor system in animal research facilities. The twin concept, as the name implies, has two parallel animal research systems that are usually adjacent to each other with support services, labs, and necropsy areas within close proximity between the separate research systems. It affords simpler separation of protocols into two distinct zones, sharing only the “downstream” functions such as necropsy and waste decontamination, which are easier protocols to manage. The pod concept takes this approach further with multiple animal room suites loading onto a common support corridor with the necessary support services around the perimeter of the space. This concept makes it easier to manage multiple protocols and pathogens, but requires a higher net-to-gross area.

At the scale of the room design itself, it is important to look closely at your flexibility requirements because most programs can’t afford to build separate room types to house the different types of species that your program may want to consider, and doing so can add to the underutilization of your facility.

“Figure out how to do more than one job within the given spaces,” suggests Kray. “It is also critical to analyze the regulatory requirements to understand what are the critical numbers in a study for different types of regulated experiments. Study the flexibility, but also overlay the science and regulatory requirements. Otherwise, you may have very flexible rooms, but they will be inefficient for the science you want to undertake.”

A good design will provide a series of spaces with an array of barrier and protocol options that will work for changing research needs. A universal module concept is flexible and adaptable for future use, but do not assume that a one-size-fits-all strategy will work in every instance. Spend the necessary time in the project definition to detail the scientific program requirements. If specialized rooms and suites are needed, they can be integrated with the more flexible multi-use design elements.

Proper room fit-outs will encourage flexibility and change-out. The use of recessed boxes for special gases, stainless adjustable shelving, stainless tables, mobile sinks, and recessed mobile sink connections may be used to provide enhanced flexibility and to maximize utilization of the multi-purpose space.

Words of Wisdom

It is critical to design around robust protocols when designing a multi-pathogen facility. Do not simply design the protocols around nice architecture or attempt to shoe-horn protocols into the spatial design.

“Flexibility costs can readily be offset by scalability,” says Uwe Ulex Mueller-Doblies, head of biosecurity at the IAH. “If you have the right flexibility, that means you can make more use of your space and ultimately that will help you run a facility more efficiently.”

Mueller-Doblies recommends analyzing the biological risks in different programs with a common safety language. In fact, the biological risks are the primary elements that should dictate how a facility is managed and operated on a daily basis.

It is also essential that users agree on a limited number of common, simple barrier procedures that separate the various risks.

“If you can keep the barrier procedures to a small number of perhaps five or six, you are more likely to be successful,” says Mueller-Doblies.

By Tracy Carbasho