An ad hoc planning committee will organize an international workshop on guiding principles and common norms for use by countries, organizations, and experts who donate or provide biological laboratories for public and animal health in low-resource contexts.
The workshop will engage both U.S. and major international donors who fund establishment of biological laboratory capacity in developing countries; representatives of major development banks; representatives of major foundations that fund laboratories; representatives of laboratory design, engineering, and construction firms; other national scientific academies; and experts who perform diagnostics, conduct research, and lead response to outbreaks of dangerous pathogens in low-resource contexts, to identify guiding principles and common norms that they believe should inform donors as they consider laboratory projects. By serving as a neutral convener, the Academies will lay the foundation for development of norms for provision of laboratory capacity.

The workshop will include: (1) an overview of the 2011 Academies workshop held in Istanbul on high-containment biological laboratories and developments since then, focused on sustainability challenges with high containment laboratories (BSL-3s and BSL-4s) in low-resource contexts; (2) models of successful provision of lower-containment laboratory capacity that meet diagnostic and research needs, including a review of the current state of the science of culture-free diagnostic methods and recent experience in West Africa; and (3) nonproliferation, biosecurity, and biosafety considerations. The workshop will also identify topics to explore during future meetings.

A rapporteur will produce a brief summary of the workshop.