Flu Pandemic Prevention
High Throughput Laboratory Network
 The Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) are collaborating to develop a new rapid response capability and surveillance system against influenza and other threatening infectious diseases. The High Throughput Laboratory Network (HTLN) will be designed and initial systems will be built at LANL and installed at the new UCLA California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI) where a biological level 3 (BL3) testing lab is being built. When operational in 2009, the UCLA lab will be the first of many labs comprising the HTLN and serve as a model. Additional laboratories in the HTLN will be located throughout the world. The HTLN will become a key part of an international infrastructure for disease surveillance as well as pandemic response management.
In response mode, the HTLN will provide the rapid, accurate, and near real-time information needed to deal with infectious disease outbreaks and to safeguard public health in ways that are not available today. It will provide information to guide emergency outbreak control with the most effective drug or vaccine intervention strategy. The HTLN will provide faster information for drug development or for vaccine strain selection. By surveying select animal populations it will continuously monitor for the emergence of novel pathogens before they infect humans. The HTLN will provide an international experimental and a response capacity that far exceeds what is available today.
Each laboratory in the HTLN will house and operate several analysis systems or nodes, each design to generate copious quantities of high quality information. When nodes at other laboratories in the HTLN collaborate they function much like a massively parallel high performance distributed computer in quickly solving a problem. Each lab will also be supported by novel sample collection technologies developed at LANL that will cut days or weeks off the time it takes to characterize a pathogen.
Chemistry Division’s Chemical Diagnostics and Engineering Group leads the HTLN project in collaboration with Bioscience Division, Applied Engineering Technology Division, and the Theoretical Division.
Funding
The HTLN program is funded by the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD). Federal funding from the DoD in the amount of $12M has been appropriated and additional funding is expected. In addition the State of California has awarded $9M to the project to build out the laboratory space as well as to acquire key technology components. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has also awarded a synergistic Center Grant to UCLA and its partners in the amount of $19M that will use these technologies to monitor avian populations for influenza.
Institutional Roles
LANL will design, procure, assemble, and test each of the systems comprising the high throughput laboratory. It will also develop the international information technology and systems control architectures. When each system is certified, LANL will deliver and install them at UCLA. UCLA will use these new technologies in their role in public health research, educate the next generation of public health scientists in their use, as well as operate the lab to support ongoing research as well as needed in a response mode.
Corporate Partners
As the HTLN grows, it will do so through its corporate partners. These companies will be best-in-class providers of instrumentation, computers and software, reagents, and labware. They will be joined together by a prime systems integrator who will sell, deploy and maintain the labs in the HTLN. Users of these labs will be governments through their Ministries of Defense, Health and Agriculture.
Sampling technologies developed at Los Alamos will be the primary means of collecting the necessary field data. An inexpensive dipstick was developed by the Bioscience division and can be employed with a minimum of training.
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| LALP-07-073 |
November/2007 |
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