UI’s Biosafety Committee works to ensure safety in labs
In honor of Biosafety Stewardship Month, University of Idaho’s labs started a two-month program to double-check safety procedures involved with using biological agents.
Jackson Flynn | Argonaut
The science department has been conducting a biosafety stewardship to ensure safe practices within the laboratories.
Terra DuBois, UI’s research compliance officer with the Office of Research Assurances, oversees the Institutional Biosafety Committee (IBC) and said she is involved in the administrative side of all UI’s biosafety activities.
DuBois said the safety initiative stemmed from a national push to address biosafety.
“Federal agencies ended up sending us letters,” she said. “Not just us, but basically probably every university involved in this – saying to us ‘look, we at a federal level are taking this seriously, and we are going through all of our federal labs and we’re doing inventories, and we’re updating training, and we’re updating safety protocols and things like that, and we think that it’s important that everyone participate and do the same.'”
She said the National Institutes of Health outlined an initiative focusing on three areas, but left specific plans to each university. She said the focus areas include taking an inventory of biological materials, double-checking that lab procedures are adequate and ensuring staff members have the appropriate training for their jobs.
DuBois said UI decided to divide each focal area into two-week periods over a two-month span, starting with the inventory issue.
She said members of the IBC work with faculty members, called principle investigators or PIs, on projects that involve biological agents to ensure protocols are up to date.
Mike Kluzik, the interim biosafety officer of the Office of Research Assurances, works with labs to help answer questions about what should be included in an inventory, and assists in maintaining internal lab policies. He said the category of “biological agents” is broad and includes agents that labs don’t actually need to inventory.
“There’s a lot of pathogens out there that we really don’t worry about, but we need to make sure we know what we have so we have accountability for those agents that we do worry about,” Kluzik said. “Once we have identified labs that have the agents that are basically covered by our institutional biosafety committee, the agents that we’re worried about, we need to make sure we have the appropriate practices and containment facilities to handle them safely.”
Kluzik said IBC is primarily concerned with monitoring biological agents that could cause harm to humans, animals, plants or the environment. But the committee also understands keeping track of everything may not be feasible.
“If you think about plants, for example, any given backyard is going to be loaded with different molds or viruses that affect the plant,” Kluzik said. “These biological agents, a lot of times, are prevalent everywhere, and if they’re already what we call ubiquitous in the environment, we really don’t need to contain them in the lab, because they’re already out there.”
He said the IBC, and labs on campus, only need to worry about agents that are unique to their location.
“That’s where it becomes very difficult, because you can’t just say all pathogens, that’s unrealistic. The world’s full of them,” Kluzik said. “So we need to draw a line of which pathogens should be covered, and which ones not.”
Jackson Flynn | Argonaut
The IBC classifies each agent based on the potential risk from each, using a system developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and NIH. The system classifies biological agents under biosafety levels that go from one, which is the least dangerous, to four, which is the most dangerous.
Kluzik said UI has several scientists working with biosafety level 1 and 2 agents, but none currently using level 3 agents. He said the university doesn’t allow the use of level 4 agents on campus.
While Kluzik said most of the scientists working with biological agents are working on projects within the biology or agricultural science department, he said the IBC has recently seen more engineers working with biological agents.
“We’ve been talking to a new engineer going into physics who’s going to be doing some work with yeast, basically BSL 1 yeast, and BSL 1 bacteria,” he said, “And we have another engineer who is looking at a cell sorter in the BEL (Buchanan Engineering Lab).”
Kluzik said he expects the inventory process to uncover some minor issues, but doesn’t expect to find any serious problems.
“I think it’s a good reinforcement activity,” he said. “We’ve heard a little bit of pushback and complaints, because it’s a little extra work on a very pressured community already, but I think it’s healthy just to confirm that we’re doing all the right things.”
DuBois said any faculty member who finds unnecessary materials in labs should properly discard them, and can reach out to the IBC for help, if necessary.
More information about the biosafety initiative is available at the IBC’s website at www.uidaho.edu/ora/committees/ibc.
Daphne Jackson can be reached at [email protected]