Key to cure lies in a Wuhan lab

IRONY One of China’s few labs that can find a cure for coronavirus lies right at heart of Wuhan, where outbreak began

BEIJING: As Wuhan grapples with a previously unknown strain of virus and is on the verge of getting shut off from the outside world, ironically, a top laboratory in China equipped to find a cure for the coronavirus infection lies right in the middle of the nowdreaded central Chinese city.

Neither Li Bin, national health commission (NHC) vice-minister, nor Gao Fu, director of the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, said anything about it at Wednesday’s briefing in Beijing even as they s poke i n de t a i l a bout t he unknown origins of the virus. It’s not clear why they chose not to bring it up.

In January 2018, China inaugurated the Wuhan bio-safety level four (BSL-4) laboratory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) or the Wuhan P4 lab in the Jiangxia district of the city.

The lab was built to look into dangerous pathogens like the coronavirus, research them and find a cure for them - part of a long-term plan in the aftermath of the SARS outbreak in the country in 2002-03 that claimed over 700 lives.

Laboratories across the world are classified between 1-4 levels depending on how dangerous the microbes they probe are. A BSL-4 lab researches the most dangerous pathogens and have to follow the maximum safety or “bio-containment” levels.

There are only a handful of such labs in Asia. India has one at the National Institute of Virology in Pune.

Lab staff at the Wuhan P4 lab, according to the CAS, “wear positive-pressure protective suit to make them totally insulated to the environment with potential pollution, just like an astronaut in space, with air being supplied through a controllable pipe from the breathing air supply station. The lab staff will complete the decontamination procedure... with a chemical shower before leaving”.

The WHO said it “represents one of China’s major investments in strengthening the public health system and bio-safety management following the SARS outbreak”.

The lab was built under a SinoFrench collaboration at the cost of 300 million yuan.

According to a report in Nature, the lab will “focus on the control of emerging diseases, store purified viruses and act as a WHO reference laboratory linked to similar labs around the world”.