COVID-19 showed just how quickly a virus can spread and how many unanswered questions that left behind. Western University in London, Ont., is hoping to change that.
The school has broken ground on a $44-million infectious disease research Centre, the first of its kind in the world, designed to study virus transmission in real-world environments. The facility is expected to open in 2027.
“We are going to be able to answer questions that have been either assumed or derived from models for many years, things we’ve taken for granted as true,” said Richard Gibson, Director of Operations at the ImPaKT Laboratory in Western’s Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry.
“When the government released the proposal to ask for facilities to expand, Eric and I sat down and thought it would be really cool if we answered those questions,” Gibson said. “When it was awarded, we knew we’d be able to do things that were really novel you know, like put an entire furnace inside the room and run it.”
He added that the Centre isn’t just about responding to future outbreaks.
“The really neat part about this facility is that it’s not limited to only being about pandemic response”. he said.
Western students in the medical sciences say the new facility could play a critical role in shaping their future careers.
“I’m excited it’s expanding western’s campus as a bio student myself, it’s creating more opportunities for me in the future,” the student said.
For Gibson, the importance of the project extends beyond crisis preparedness.
“We don’t need a new pandemic to understand the value of this. The facility is there and available for pandemic preparedness, but we don’t need a pandemic for this facility to be useful”. he said.
