K-State National Food & Animal Health Institute
Introduction-continued
In March of 1999, K-State unveiled a comprehensive Homeland Defense Food Safety, Security, and Emergency Preparedness Program, more commonly known as the Food Safety and Security (FS2) program. As noted at the time, K-State will be solving today's food crop, food animal, and food safety problems, while preparing to meet and defeat emerging threats of tomorrow. The multifaceted FS2 initiative proposed to:
K-State's commitment to America's agrosecurity and biosecurity began well in advance of September 11, 2001, and our security related activities have accelerated since that time. The FS2 program gave rise to the National Agricultural Biosecurity Center (NABC) at K-State in 2002. The following year, Dr. David Franz was recruited as the NABC Director, reuniting with Drs. Jerry and Nancy Jaax (of the book HOT ZONE re: Ebola fame) who served with him when he commanded the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Disease. The recruitment of Dr. Franz was accomplished in partnership with MRI in Kansas City.
With State of Kansas legislation and support, construction began in 2004 on the Biosecurity Research Institute (BRI), a $54 million BSL-3Ag facility at K-State. Completed on time and on budget, the BRI is unique because of its integrated agrosecurity/food safety and security capabilities. The functional cores include:
Federal officials who have visited the BRI and reviewed K-State's FS2 program and NABC activities see them as vital to national security. Thus, K-State became a finalist for the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS's) National Bio and Agro-defense Facility (NBAF). The NBAF is projected to cost over $450 million and employ hundreds of scientific staff.
The NFAHI initiative grows out of these activities in Manhattan and it will leverage the exceptional public and private sector resources in animal health and the life sciences within the Kansas City area. The region is a global research and development leader in animal vaccines and diagnostics, animal nutrition, and the basic mechanisms of disease - both animal and human. As a result, Kansas City has become the central hub of the Animal Health Corridor, which includes over 120 companies, nearly 40 of which have their corporate headquarters in the area. Over 40% of U.S. sales and 26% of worldwide sales within the $14.5 billion animal health industry are from companies with a presence in the Kansas City region.
Kansas is also at the biomass epicenter of America making it an ideal location for bioenergy innovation. Thus, K-State and MRI propose to establish the Commercialization Center for Bioenergy (CCB) on the Olathe campus. The CCB will also be housed in the NFAHI, with the mission to provide national leadership in near-term commercialization of bioenergy and bioenergy products thereby linking America's energy security to biosecurity.
Research within and linked to the NFAHI will provide the discovery horsepower. The Kansas City bioscience industry will provide technology transfer to the bioscience innovation life cycle. The NFAHI will forge a model for deliberative policymaking based on transparency, being designed to enhance public trust through public and private stakeholder participation.
Back to Top
Partnership
K-State and MRI are logical partners in the NFAHI initiative. For example, K-State partnered with state and local law enforcement to complete a National Institute of Justice sponsored project defining the role of law enforcement in agroterrorism. This study helped to identify the need for new forensic tools and enhanced communication within the law enforcement community and externally with other homeland security and national defense stakeholders. The final report, submitted in June 2005, helped define the need for the NFAHI.
MRI and K-State supported the 1st International Symposium on Agroterrorism (ISA) presented by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in Kansas City in May 2005. Both were partners with the FBI in the 2006 ISA. In fact, the FBI's date for the 2006 conference was selected to coincide with K-State's opening of the BRI; our biocontainment facility focused on pre- and post-harvest food safety and security threats. MRI was a consultant for K-State on the construction and future operations of the BRI. The new facility, coupled with the BSL-3 laboratory space operative at MRI, provides the requisite biocontainment capabilities to validate new forensic tools.
K-State and MRI have collaborated on research projects for many years, and this relationship has grown appreciably during that time. A joint recruitment effort in 2003 led to the hiring of Dr. David Franz to serve as MRI's Chief Biological Scientist and K-State's NABC Director. Exploiting Dr. Franz' expertise, national defense and homeland security are foundations upon which new initiatives are being built.
Back to Top
History and Current Conditions
The economic health of the Midwest depends on the safety, security, and defense of our food supply. Endemic and exotic diseases threaten this economic lifeline. The researchers in the Kansas City region have adopted a "one-medicine" approach to finding solutions for these threats. The one-medicine approach links the animal health and the human health communities to jointly search for answers to health and bioscience questions. This strategy is particularly relevant to biodefense and emerging infectious disease research for several important reasons.
First, many of the emerging diseases are zoonotic in nature. These diseases pose real threats to food animals, wildlife and human health. Most pandemics in the world over the past 50 years have been triggered by zoonotic diseases.
Second, solutions to animal and human health problems require fundamental understanding of the same basic disease physiology principles. Treating animal and human diseases require the same tools and technology to bring the solutions from concepts to reality.
In the event that endemic or exotic disease threats are delivered by criminal means, law enforcement officials must collaborate with agricultural and human health first responders to ensure public safety, contain/mitigate the threat and preserve the chain of evidence to enforce our laws.
Finally, communication with the public about threats to the nation's food supply and public health should involve stakeholders from the inception of assessments about such risks. Such a collaborative approach involving government, media and the public recognizes that policy decisions in democracies frequently are made by non-experts and that both public and expert understanding are desirable.
An operations hub is required to house the National Food and Animal Health Institute. It will serve as the focal point to bring together all relevant stakeholders - law enforcement, first responders, elected officials, media, and the agriculture, food and one-medicine communities. This will involve people and businesses from the Kansas City metropolitan area and the surrounding region. Placing K-State's NFAHI in Johnson County will establish an information and research resource near the highest concentration of stakeholders.
Back to Top
Academic Program
The course work on the K-State Olathe Innovation Campus will focus on graduate degree and certificate programs. Current graduate degree programs to be offered would likely include those in Food Science (M.S. and Ph.D.), Biomedical Sciences (M.S.), and Animal Science and Industry (M.S. and Ph.D.), as well as the Master of Public Health with tracks in infectious disease and food safety and security. Current certificate programs might include Food Science, Food Safety and Security, Occupational Health Psychology, Feedlot Production Management, Applied Statistics, and Stem Cell Technology (under review). Many more are offered on the Manhattan campus.
New graduate initiatives may include an interdisciplinary homeland security program (M.S. and certificate) with cores in agriculture, food, infectious disease, and associated disciplines, as well as programs in bioforensics, bioinformatics, laboratory practices, laboratory safety technology, and biotechnology. In the Kansas City metropolitan area, these cross disciplinary efforts would serve agriculture, health care, and food service professionals; local, state, federal, and tribal government officials; law enforcement; emergency first responders; and a host of other traditional and nontraditional students.
Back to Top
Research Potential
The NFAHI initiative will focus on five core research areas and the strategic educational programs that support them. The facility will support both on-campus educational activities and will serve as a meeting place for Kansas City area students within a variety of KSU distance education programs. Meeting rooms, auditoria, information technology centers, and library annex space will complement research facilities.
Back to Top
Threat Assessment and Prevention Core
Threat assessments will reveal pre-harvest and post-harvest vulnerabilities in our food supply and one-medicine infrastructure. Research will focus on threat mitigation which involves both technology and operations solutions. Preventive genetics will produce food sources which have improved resistance to disease threats and vaccines will be developed and tested.
Back to Top
Forensic Core
Assays to recognize and identify pathogens will be developed using a range of technologies included PCR, hybridization, bioanalytical chemistry, proteomics genomics and lipidomics. Hyperspatial strategies will be deployed to provide assessments of large geographic areas and appropriate sampling methods will be developed.
Back to Top
Agroinformatics and Modeling Core
Agro-epidemiology and appropriate dispersion modeling of pathogens will allow predictive mapping of a project course following a pathogenic event. Agroinformatics will allow cluster analyses, coincidence detection as well as outbreak detection and monitoring. By developing whole organism sequencing tools, pathogen genomics can be integrated with worldwide bioinformatic tools.
Back to Top
Communication Strategies Core
Communication scholars recognize the need to develop better public participation strategies to facilitate information transfer about emerging threats. These strategies include following the impact of threat transparency for food safety and examining what threat transparency does to public trust. Also included is studying the effects of moral, democratic and cultural dimensions in biosecurity and defense in the public policy arena. The FBIC will provide research opportunity for communication scholars to evaluate how these threats play out in the public domain.
Back to Top
Advanced Technology Core
The combined BSL-3 laboratory capabilities of the Midwest Research Institute and Kansas State University will allow agricultural, food, animal health and public health research using live agents for vulnerability and threat mitigation strategy validation.
Back to Top
Site
Placing the NFAHI in the Kansas City region will establish an information and research resource in America's heartland focused on the safety and defense of the nation's food supply. The NFAHI will provide a fusion of research, technology transfer, public policy discussion and educational outreach with a focus on the law enforcement, public communicator and first responder communities. It will provide a facility in which research focused on food safety and agricultural forensic science can be fostered and discussed. Genomic, proteomic, and lipidomic technologies established and refined throughout the Kansas City region provide powerful tools for identifying biomarkers for infectious disease agents. Research investigating the fundamentals of innate immunity seeks to understand how host responses limit the degree of infection, with the goal of using genetic approaches to render our food crops/animals immune to disease threats. Technologies complementing innate immunity, such as vaccine production and chemical remediation, will limit vulnerability to infectious disease. The food supply is also at risk post-harvest, underscoring the value of focused research on the detection of contamination and validation of remediation/sanitization technologies.
The site location of the K-State OIC is in the Kansas Bioscience Park north of College Boulevard and east of K7 highway (shown on the location map). The concept plan prepared by the Kansas Bioscience Authority has provided for site development of roads, parking lots, walks, storm water retention ponds and available site utilities.
The K-State OIC site is about 38 acres. The first building on this site is planned to provide approximately 100,000 gross square foot of laboratory, office, training, conference and other support spaces. Site and geological survey will provide required information for building site drainage and grading, paving and landscaping, site utilities, open spaces around the building and security elements.
Back to Top
In March of 1999, K-State unveiled a comprehensive Homeland Defense Food Safety, Security, and Emergency Preparedness Program, more commonly known as the Food Safety and Security (FS2) program. As noted at the time, K-State will be solving today's food crop, food animal, and food safety problems, while preparing to meet and defeat emerging threats of tomorrow. The multifaceted FS2 initiative proposed to:
- enhance agrosecurity research efforts focused on food crops, food animals, and food safety;
- utilize the land grant, county-by-county network for frontline defense;
- establish interactive linkages between the agricultural and food sectors as well as the first responder, law enforcement, and military defense communities;
- create a broad-based agrosecurity education and training program; and
- build an integrated (food crop/food animal/food processing) BSL-3Ag facility to support agrosecurity research at K-State and to help meet the surge capacity needs for biocontainment laboratories regionally and nationally.
K-State's commitment to America's agrosecurity and biosecurity began well in advance of September 11, 2001, and our security related activities have accelerated since that time. The FS2 program gave rise to the National Agricultural Biosecurity Center (NABC) at K-State in 2002. The following year, Dr. David Franz was recruited as the NABC Director, reuniting with Drs. Jerry and Nancy Jaax (of the book HOT ZONE re: Ebola fame) who served with him when he commanded the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Disease. The recruitment of Dr. Franz was accomplished in partnership with MRI in Kansas City.
With State of Kansas legislation and support, construction began in 2004 on the Biosecurity Research Institute (BRI), a $54 million BSL-3Ag facility at K-State. Completed on time and on budget, the BRI is unique because of its integrated agrosecurity/food safety and security capabilities. The functional cores include:
- animal rooms and support facilities for research on infectious diseases of livestock and poultry (holding up to 32 eight-hundred pound cattle and many more smaller species);
- food processing capabilities to validate technologies developed for pathogen mitigation;
- plant science laboratories for research on the control of food crop pathogens and for developing plant-based vaccines;
- insect vector research laboratories;
- basic molecular biology laboratories;
- biosecurity education and training space; and
- administrative support space.
Federal officials who have visited the BRI and reviewed K-State's FS2 program and NABC activities see them as vital to national security. Thus, K-State became a finalist for the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS's) National Bio and Agro-defense Facility (NBAF). The NBAF is projected to cost over $450 million and employ hundreds of scientific staff.
The NFAHI initiative grows out of these activities in Manhattan and it will leverage the exceptional public and private sector resources in animal health and the life sciences within the Kansas City area. The region is a global research and development leader in animal vaccines and diagnostics, animal nutrition, and the basic mechanisms of disease - both animal and human. As a result, Kansas City has become the central hub of the Animal Health Corridor, which includes over 120 companies, nearly 40 of which have their corporate headquarters in the area. Over 40% of U.S. sales and 26% of worldwide sales within the $14.5 billion animal health industry are from companies with a presence in the Kansas City region.
Kansas is also at the biomass epicenter of America making it an ideal location for bioenergy innovation. Thus, K-State and MRI propose to establish the Commercialization Center for Bioenergy (CCB) on the Olathe campus. The CCB will also be housed in the NFAHI, with the mission to provide national leadership in near-term commercialization of bioenergy and bioenergy products thereby linking America's energy security to biosecurity.
Research within and linked to the NFAHI will provide the discovery horsepower. The Kansas City bioscience industry will provide technology transfer to the bioscience innovation life cycle. The NFAHI will forge a model for deliberative policymaking based on transparency, being designed to enhance public trust through public and private stakeholder participation.
Back to Top
Partnership
K-State and MRI are logical partners in the NFAHI initiative. For example, K-State partnered with state and local law enforcement to complete a National Institute of Justice sponsored project defining the role of law enforcement in agroterrorism. This study helped to identify the need for new forensic tools and enhanced communication within the law enforcement community and externally with other homeland security and national defense stakeholders. The final report, submitted in June 2005, helped define the need for the NFAHI.
MRI and K-State supported the 1st International Symposium on Agroterrorism (ISA) presented by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in Kansas City in May 2005. Both were partners with the FBI in the 2006 ISA. In fact, the FBI's date for the 2006 conference was selected to coincide with K-State's opening of the BRI; our biocontainment facility focused on pre- and post-harvest food safety and security threats. MRI was a consultant for K-State on the construction and future operations of the BRI. The new facility, coupled with the BSL-3 laboratory space operative at MRI, provides the requisite biocontainment capabilities to validate new forensic tools.
K-State and MRI have collaborated on research projects for many years, and this relationship has grown appreciably during that time. A joint recruitment effort in 2003 led to the hiring of Dr. David Franz to serve as MRI's Chief Biological Scientist and K-State's NABC Director. Exploiting Dr. Franz' expertise, national defense and homeland security are foundations upon which new initiatives are being built.
Back to Top
History and Current Conditions
The economic health of the Midwest depends on the safety, security, and defense of our food supply. Endemic and exotic diseases threaten this economic lifeline. The researchers in the Kansas City region have adopted a "one-medicine" approach to finding solutions for these threats. The one-medicine approach links the animal health and the human health communities to jointly search for answers to health and bioscience questions. This strategy is particularly relevant to biodefense and emerging infectious disease research for several important reasons.
First, many of the emerging diseases are zoonotic in nature. These diseases pose real threats to food animals, wildlife and human health. Most pandemics in the world over the past 50 years have been triggered by zoonotic diseases.
Second, solutions to animal and human health problems require fundamental understanding of the same basic disease physiology principles. Treating animal and human diseases require the same tools and technology to bring the solutions from concepts to reality.
In the event that endemic or exotic disease threats are delivered by criminal means, law enforcement officials must collaborate with agricultural and human health first responders to ensure public safety, contain/mitigate the threat and preserve the chain of evidence to enforce our laws.
Finally, communication with the public about threats to the nation's food supply and public health should involve stakeholders from the inception of assessments about such risks. Such a collaborative approach involving government, media and the public recognizes that policy decisions in democracies frequently are made by non-experts and that both public and expert understanding are desirable.
An operations hub is required to house the National Food and Animal Health Institute. It will serve as the focal point to bring together all relevant stakeholders - law enforcement, first responders, elected officials, media, and the agriculture, food and one-medicine communities. This will involve people and businesses from the Kansas City metropolitan area and the surrounding region. Placing K-State's NFAHI in Johnson County will establish an information and research resource near the highest concentration of stakeholders.
Back to Top
Academic Program
The course work on the K-State Olathe Innovation Campus will focus on graduate degree and certificate programs. Current graduate degree programs to be offered would likely include those in Food Science (M.S. and Ph.D.), Biomedical Sciences (M.S.), and Animal Science and Industry (M.S. and Ph.D.), as well as the Master of Public Health with tracks in infectious disease and food safety and security. Current certificate programs might include Food Science, Food Safety and Security, Occupational Health Psychology, Feedlot Production Management, Applied Statistics, and Stem Cell Technology (under review). Many more are offered on the Manhattan campus.
New graduate initiatives may include an interdisciplinary homeland security program (M.S. and certificate) with cores in agriculture, food, infectious disease, and associated disciplines, as well as programs in bioforensics, bioinformatics, laboratory practices, laboratory safety technology, and biotechnology. In the Kansas City metropolitan area, these cross disciplinary efforts would serve agriculture, health care, and food service professionals; local, state, federal, and tribal government officials; law enforcement; emergency first responders; and a host of other traditional and nontraditional students.
Back to Top
Research Potential
The NFAHI initiative will focus on five core research areas and the strategic educational programs that support them. The facility will support both on-campus educational activities and will serve as a meeting place for Kansas City area students within a variety of KSU distance education programs. Meeting rooms, auditoria, information technology centers, and library annex space will complement research facilities.
Back to Top
Threat Assessment and Prevention Core
Threat assessments will reveal pre-harvest and post-harvest vulnerabilities in our food supply and one-medicine infrastructure. Research will focus on threat mitigation which involves both technology and operations solutions. Preventive genetics will produce food sources which have improved resistance to disease threats and vaccines will be developed and tested.
Back to Top
Forensic Core
Assays to recognize and identify pathogens will be developed using a range of technologies included PCR, hybridization, bioanalytical chemistry, proteomics genomics and lipidomics. Hyperspatial strategies will be deployed to provide assessments of large geographic areas and appropriate sampling methods will be developed.
Back to Top
Agroinformatics and Modeling Core
Agro-epidemiology and appropriate dispersion modeling of pathogens will allow predictive mapping of a project course following a pathogenic event. Agroinformatics will allow cluster analyses, coincidence detection as well as outbreak detection and monitoring. By developing whole organism sequencing tools, pathogen genomics can be integrated with worldwide bioinformatic tools.
Back to Top
Communication Strategies Core
Communication scholars recognize the need to develop better public participation strategies to facilitate information transfer about emerging threats. These strategies include following the impact of threat transparency for food safety and examining what threat transparency does to public trust. Also included is studying the effects of moral, democratic and cultural dimensions in biosecurity and defense in the public policy arena. The FBIC will provide research opportunity for communication scholars to evaluate how these threats play out in the public domain.
Back to Top
Advanced Technology Core
The combined BSL-3 laboratory capabilities of the Midwest Research Institute and Kansas State University will allow agricultural, food, animal health and public health research using live agents for vulnerability and threat mitigation strategy validation.
Back to Top
Site
Placing the NFAHI in the Kansas City region will establish an information and research resource in America's heartland focused on the safety and defense of the nation's food supply. The NFAHI will provide a fusion of research, technology transfer, public policy discussion and educational outreach with a focus on the law enforcement, public communicator and first responder communities. It will provide a facility in which research focused on food safety and agricultural forensic science can be fostered and discussed. Genomic, proteomic, and lipidomic technologies established and refined throughout the Kansas City region provide powerful tools for identifying biomarkers for infectious disease agents. Research investigating the fundamentals of innate immunity seeks to understand how host responses limit the degree of infection, with the goal of using genetic approaches to render our food crops/animals immune to disease threats. Technologies complementing innate immunity, such as vaccine production and chemical remediation, will limit vulnerability to infectious disease. The food supply is also at risk post-harvest, underscoring the value of focused research on the detection of contamination and validation of remediation/sanitization technologies.
The site location of the K-State OIC is in the Kansas Bioscience Park north of College Boulevard and east of K7 highway (shown on the location map). The concept plan prepared by the Kansas Bioscience Authority has provided for site development of roads, parking lots, walks, storm water retention ponds and available site utilities.
The K-State OIC site is about 38 acres. The first building on this site is planned to provide approximately 100,000 gross square foot of laboratory, office, training, conference and other support spaces. Site and geological survey will provide required information for building site drainage and grading, paving and landscaping, site utilities, open spaces around the building and security elements.
Back to Top
© 2008 JoCo Triangle | site by SPIDERtel
Paid for by the Committee for the Johnson County Education Research Triangle.
Brent McCune, Treasurer
Brent McCune, Treasurer