Washington

For a year and a half, biomedical scientists in the United States have heard a steady refrain: get set for the era of biodefence.

Now the federal funds are flowing, and policy-makers are calling for researchers to join the fight against bioterror. But last week the first-ever Biodefense Research Meeting — held in Baltimore, Maryland, by the American Society for Microbiology — highlighted the challenges facing research administrators as they attempt to encourage university researchers to join the gold rush.

Most of the research presented at the meeting came from government facilities such as the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases in Fort Detrick, Maryland. These labs have a huge head start in biodefence research, and already have the facilities and culture that promote such work. And their staff researchers dominated the meeting's poster sessions, where more than 200 new ideas lined up for attention.

But observers say that these labs cannot do the whole job by themselves, and that universities must be involved. “We need to try to get the best and the brightest from the broadest spectrum of the scientific community engaged in this effort,” says Gail Cassell, a research scholar in infectious diseases and a vice-president at drug company Eli Lilly in Indianapolis, Indiana.

Cassell was one of those at the meeting who identified areas in biodefence that need urgent attention. These range from basic work on pathogenesis and human immunity to future applications such as universal vaccines and therapeutics. Perhaps most pressing is the need for new vaccines, antibiotics and antiviral drugs, which will be difficult to develop.

Some at the meeting were asking whether the maze of regulations and security issues raised by biodefence work will deter academic researchers from joining the field. “The security issues are going to be a new thing for a lot of the academic scientists who want to get involved in this,” says Gigi Kwik, a fellow with the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies in Baltimore, Maryland.

Some of these issues involve regulations on who can work on dangerous pathogens, and where such research can be done. Other researchers expressed fears about the harsh scrutiny that biodefence is likely to attract. Earlier this year, for example, Thomas Butler, a biologist at Texas Tech University in Lubbock was dragged off to prison and publicly humiliated after wrongly accounting for the disposal of some samples of plague bacteria (see Nature Med. 9, 247; 2003).

Another factor causing reticence among academics is apprehension that the government will step in and regulate the kind of data that can be published. Some researchers complain that they were not consulted on a recent publishers' statement on biosecurity and scientific literature signed by this journal, among others (see Nature 421, 771; 2003), and that it may worsen that situation. “There should have been a dialogue, but there wasn't one,” says microbiologist Stanley Falkow of Stanford University.

Critics have also claimed that the biodefence programme lacks the emphasis on basic research needed to crack its most important challenges. “This is really a long-term issue that is not going to be addressed in four or five years,” says Falkow. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has repeatedly defended his agency's commitment to basic research. But of the $1.5 billion in new biodefence money that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) will give out this year, $454 million will go towards work on vaccines, diagnostics and therapeutics, and only $297 million to basic research.

Despite these concerns, many observers remain confident that the vast sums of money being poured into biodefence will lead to gains against medically important diseases. “There will be a lot that comes from this investment that will have very broad applications, not just to threat agents, but to many other naturally occurring pathogens,” says Cassell.

Others suggest that the size of the investment is sure to get academics involved. “As the infrastructure is enhanced, it will become easier and easier for more people to become involved in biodefence,” says Gary Nabel, director of the NIH's Vaccine Research Center in Bethesda, Maryland. “I do hope there is interest out there.”