“An inadequately funded facility can subject the university to unacceptable, immediate, and long-term risks” says John Lopez, major project engineer at Lovelace Respiratory Research Institute, a private biomedical research organization in Albuquerque, N.M., that studies the health effects of airborne pathogens and toxins “Risks include personnel exposure, illness or death, environmental contamination, invalidation of research, failures, delays or failure to obtain facility operating  approvals, and loss of research funding following incidents of significance.”

It can be quite difficult to gauge how much a highly technical facility will actually cost to operate and maintain. This is especially true for a university lacking experience with these types of facilities. Top administrators of sponsoring institutions need to fully understand and commit to the resources required for these facilities—requirements ranging from highly skilled staff to complex operational and maintenance processes.

Four Primary Controls

Lopez suggests four tools, or primary controls, that universities can use as a framework for assessing the operating costs of a biocontainment facility: the use of personal protective equipment, engineering controls, work practices, and administrative.

“You can apply these at any stage of the project including the design, commissioning, and operation and maintenance,” Lopez says. “These controls serve as checks and balances. Where there have been failures, it’s because there were failures in all four of these primary controls.”

The first primary control, personal protective equipment, encompasses questions of precisely what equipment will be needed and in what quantities, determining which workers can use the equipment, the proper use and fit of the equipment, and how workers will decontaminate and maintain the equipment.

Engineering controls, the second primary control, takes into account all the physical elements that are included in biocontainment facilities and the resources required for their proper operation and maintenance. These include HEPA filtration,  wastewater decontamination, sterilization equipment, specialized containment equipment such as gloveboxes and biosafety cabinets, pressure gradient controls, alarm and notification systems, decontamination systems, and special security systems. Since many biocontainment facilities include redundancy to achieve reliability, additional resources are required for this redundancy.

Work practices, the third primary control, involves all operational and maintenance processes that are involved in managing the facility, including biocontainment, biosafety, biosecurity, and research processes. These can include such processes as control and inventory of biological agents; human and animal access and egress; management of biological, hazardous, and non-hazardous waste; sterilization and decontamination; data management; communications; emergency management; and facility maintenance and repair.

“Because each process has a cost associated with it, all processes have to be mapped out from beginning to end,” says Lopez. “Generate written operating procedures and establish a baseline for each process to ensure repeatability and consistency of operations. Then if an incident occurs, you have a baseline for addressing the issue for continuous improvement. However, the process of developing these procedures also entails both a significant start-up and ongoing cost.”

The fourth primary control, administration, includes the overarching management processes and controls for ensuring safe and effective operation. This includes mechanisms for determining and maintaining whether people meet the reliability, performance, skill, security, medical, and training requirements necessary to work in biocontainment facilities. An effective training program, which identifies and provides training in response to new or revised operating procedures and the use of new biological agents, is a key administrative control. An effective program for identifying, developing, distributing, and updating operating procedures is also an important administrative control.

“Productivity is a major factor in biocontainment because of downtime,” says Lopez. “Going in and out of biocontainment, you’re not doing any work. You’re just spending a lot of time getting ready. When you do your analysis, there’s a cost attached to this for both the employees and any contract personnel.”

Answering the Difficult Questions

Neal Shinn, user program manager at the Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies (CINT), a nanoscale science research center jointly developed and operated by Los Alamos National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories, says that realistically estimating the cost of a high-tech lab means answering difficult questions.

CINT is one of five Department of Energy (DOE) nanoscale science research centers devoted to the discovery, understanding, and utilization of nanoscale materials. It operates the CINT Core Facility in Albuquerque, N.M., and the CINT Gateway to the Los Alamos facility in Los Alamos, N.M. Like most nanotech research facilities, and like the other four DOE nanotech research centers, CINT leverages the infrastructure of an existing institution. This dynamic, of particular relevance to universities, is a crucial consideration in assessing costs, Shinn says.

“Regardless of what sort of facility it is—nano, bio, healthcare—you need to ask yourself what the institution is providing, and what the facility itself will have to provide. Examine your assumptions and make sure they’re sound. The better you do this, the happier you’ll be two to three years down the line.”

In benchmarking against other facilities, it’s important to carefully scrutinize and articulate commonalities and differences.

“Look at other facilities that have the features you have,” advises Shinn. “Do they have cleanrooms? Do they have the same types of scientists on staff?  Do they have graduate students? Do they do similar research? Also, look carefully at your mission and how the facility will support that. Is this a teaching lab, a research lab for graduate students, or a lab for post-docs and faculty? Or is it a user facility, with numerous external visitors coming through every year?”

Interdisciplinary research facilities pose special challenges, Shinn says.

“Creating an interdisciplinary building sounds wonderful, but what it really means is sorting through a lot of sticky issues, such as who actually owns the building, who’s accountable for the people inside, and who writes the rules that everyone has to abide by.”

A building’s siting can have enormous impact on operations. The siting of the CINT Core Facility, for example, ended up requiring a lot of extra planning.

“We sited the CINT Core Facility on publicly accessible land adjacent to the rest of Sandia Labs, which is located on an Air Force base,” explains Shinn. “On the face of it, it sounded great because the public would be able to access the building without having to enter the Air Force base. What it really meant was that the ways we serviced the building were completely new to Sandia. We had to figure out exactly how we were going to get services, training, people, maintenance, and deliveries to the building.”

Safety and Security

In addition to providing sufficient funding to ensure compliance with existing safety regulations, decision-makers must also consider the possibility that regulations may change over time.

“Some—but certainly not all—nanomaterials we’re working with are new, and the regulatory agencies are still determining the appropriate procedures, rules, and regulations,” Shinn says. “If, for example, we were to do work for which HEPA filters would be required on all our fume hoods, that would be an expensive retrofit.”

Project budgets must also cover training, both of the facility’s own employees and, in the case of a user facility such as CINT, researchers from outside institutions working in the facility.

“Someone can walk in and tell me that they took a laser safety class, but I have no idea what that laser class taught,” says Shinn. “You have to benchmark the skills.”

High-tech facilities also require high security, both physical and electronic, as well as strong public relations programs.

“You have to decide who’s going to have access to what, what sort of security you’ll need, and who’s going to provide it,” says Shinn. “High-visibility labs are also under constant attack by cyber-hackers. Balancing security with open communication is important, however. If the public becomes afraid of what’s going on in your facility because you don’t communicate effectively with them, it can hurt you in the long term.”

Don’t Skimp

Shinn notes a tendency among decision-makers to underestimate labor costs for a high-tech facility’s support functions.

“Everyone wants to put money into research professors and graduate students. They forget about maintenance, tech support, and training. It comes back to bite you.”

Fitout costs and ongoing capital improvements are often similarly neglected.

“Buildings are new only once,” says Shinn. “It takes big bucks to keep a building state-of-the-art. If we change one staff scientist, that new person can change the operating envelope all around his laboratory.”

Last, value engineering should be done very carefully.

“Are you really going to live without those things you’re value engineering out?” cautions Shinn. “If you cross it out thinking you can get it later, do yourself a favor and put that feature back in now, because it costs a lot more to add it in after the building is built.”

By Deborah Kreuze