Work described in this story was made possible in part by federal funding supported by taxpayers. At Harvard Medical School, the future of efforts like this - done in service to humanity - now hangs in the balance due to the government's decision to terminate large numbers of federally funded grants and contracts across Harvard University.
- By JAKE MILLER
A world-class biomedical research laboratory sits in an unassuming recycled shipping container in a neighborhood in one of the global epicenters of tuberculosis.
As the ventilation system hums, scientists and technicians in the lab - owned and operated by Socios En Salud, the Peruvian branch of the international health care delivery nonprofit Partners In Health - work to improve TB diagnosis for the sick people in their neighborhood, improve treatment for TB and other diseases worldwide, and deepen scientific understanding of one of humanity's oldest and deadliest infectious foes.
Since its founding in the 1990s, Socios En Salud has worked closely with researchers from Harvard Medical School and other institutions to improve clinical care while helping advance the basic science that provides the foundation for more progress.
Those collaborations have helped build a biobank with hundreds of thousands of sputum and blood samples, tens of thousands of cultures of purified samples of tuberculosis from different patients, and more than 5,000 complete genome sequences of the bacteria that cause TB. The samples are linked to electronic medical records that include valuable, anonymized patient information, such as how people responded to TB drugs; what other illnesses they had; and social, economic, and environmental factors that researchers suspect play a role in determining who gets sick.
"Those samples, linked to robust clinical and demographic data in a searchable database, are an unequaled, irreplicable resource for the future of science and for the fight against tuberculosis," said Megan Murray, the Ronda Stryker and William Johnston Professor of Global Health in the Blavatnik Institute at HMS. Much of Murray's work has been done in collaboration with Socios En Salud and other branches of PIH.
But reductions in funding from the National Institutes of Health, USAID, and other U.S. agencies that support science and global health may now make it impossible to keep the lab running or to maintain the freezers that preserve the samples. Socios En Salud has already had to cut clinical staff and programming, making it difficult to see how they can cover the costs on their own, Murray said.
Since it arrived, the lab has powered major advances in understanding and treating TB and other illnesses and provided clinical testing for many diseases for Lima residents. Socios En Salud has invested in highly trained people and shared its know-how across Latin America and around the world.
"If we lose those freezers and can't preserve the archive they contain, we're never going to get it back. There isn't anything like it anywhere in the world," Murray said.
A lab where science is needed most
In 2008, Murray was working with Mercedes Becerra, now the Jeffrey Cheah Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine at HMS, to launch a new research project in Peru. Initially, they were hoping to use Peru's national laboratory system to do the microbiology work for the project, but when the Peruvian collaborators saw the scale of the work, they realized they couldn't meet the demand while also providing the lab work their patients needed.
Socios En Salud was already involved in the project, and PIH decided the time was right to get their own lab to improve care delivery for patients in local communities and to support the research project.
At a cost of approximately $1 million, PIH arranged for a Biosafety Level 3 lab to be built in South Africa in a repurposed cargo container and shipped across the Southern Ocean to Lima.
