Syracuse gets $7.6 million lab to study deadly infections, head off next pandemic
Updated Mar 12, 2021;
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Syracuse, N.Y. – A $7.6 million lab designed to let researchers safely work with potentially deadly infections such as Covid-19, Lyme disease and West Nile virus opened today at SUNY Upstate Medical University.
It is the first level-3 biosafety lab at Upstate and the only one in the SUNY system statewide.
Researchers will use the facility, known as the Vector Biocontainment Lab, to develop an anti-tick vaccine and other treatments to fight diseases spread by mosquitoes and ticks.
The facility is equipped with incubators that can generate hundreds of mosquitoes and ticks. Researchers can infect mosquito cells with viruses and bacteria inside enclosed biosafety cabinets.
A team of Tulane University biomedical engineering students has been selected as a semi-finalist in the 11
Team CerFix will join 35 student teams from national and international universities as they present low-cost technologies they have designed to address global health challenges in settings with limited resources. Three finalists will be selected to compete in a live virtual finale on March 26. The competition is sponsored by the Rice 360º Institute for Global Health.
Team CerFix, consisting of Emma Chapel, Katherine Mattingly, Madeline Tallman and Sydney Siegmeister, developed the device as part of a capstone design course required of all biomedical engineering seniors. They described it as an “efficient, intuitive tool to effectively visualize the cervix and screen for precancerous and cancerous lesions” among women living in low-resourced rural communities along the Amazon River in Peru.
New research from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill suggests that people who have had COVID-19 may need only one shot of vaccine.
The study led by the UNC School of Medicine and UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health showed one dose of either the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccine known as mRNA vaccines boosted antibodies among those who previously had COVID-19.
“These results support a new and growing body of research suggesting that prior coronavirus infection may act as a primer for the immune response to the first dose of mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccine,” said first study author Emily Ciccone, a clinical instructor and fellow in the Division of Infectious Diseases at the School of Medicine.