Saranac Lake facility involved in flu-vaccine research

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SARANAC LAKE — Trudeau Institute will open its new Ronald B. Stafford Medical Research Building early next year and hopes to expand further in the future.

The world-renowned scientific research facility employs 134 people from eight countries and boasts an annual budget of $16 million.

President and Director David Woodland likened Trudeau to a hotel that provides lab space, facilities and support to teams of researchers, who have to raise their own funding through grants and endowments.

THE BASICS
Trudeau Institute, now in its 125th year, started as a tuberculosis-treatment facility under Dr. Edward Livingston Trudeau, whose TB studies, Woodland said, should be credited as the foundation of biomedical research in the United States.

The institute's aim is to improve human health through research.

"If you can figure out how something works," Woodland said in an Editorial Board meeting with the Press-Republican, "then you can figure out how to better treat it."

He said it is astonishing the amount that scientists still don't know about how the body's immune system works.

The teams concentrate on basic and applied research, not developing actual products.

Trudeau specializes in lung-related research as its 11 teams study vaccines, influenza, TB, cancer, stem cells, aging, inflammation and autoimmunity, often with intertwined threads.

FLU VACCINE
H1N1, or swine flu, is the hot topic now nationally, and Trudeau scientists are right in the mix on that, trying to pin down a better vaccine for influenza, in general.

The problem with current flu vaccines, Woodland said, is that they are fairly weak and have to be reformulated every year because the virus changes.

The way vaccines work now, he described, is that the antibodies stick to the outside of the virus and "gum it up."

"But the immune system has another way to deal with viruses," Woodland said. "White blood cells can target infected cells."

Trudeau scientists are trying to figure out how to train the immune system to emphasize the white-blood-cell response to the lungs.

It's far more complicated than it sounds, but if they can do that, it could lead to a vaccine that will work year after year against any type of influenza.

"Trudeau is making that a priority," Woodland said. "We can make it work but only for periods of time — about six months. We're still a few years away from this being used."

PRODUCTION SNAGS
Although there has been considerable griping nationwide about the dearth of vaccine being produced and distributed, Woodland is actually impressed with the government's efforts.

The virus popped up only last April, at the end of flu season, he notes, and vaccine producers couldn't make as much because it doesn't grow as well in eggs, so they didn't have much time to get it ready before this flu season started.

Woodland said the government "perhaps overpromised" on the number of vaccines it could deliver.

As for concerns about the H1N1 vaccine, Woodland calls it "by far the safest vaccine out there. It makes no sense to be concerned about it."

He noted that it was made in exactly the same way the seasonal flu shot is made and actually likely would have just been included in that mix, without fanfare, if it had cropped up earlier.

EXPANSION
Trudeau's new Stafford Center, with funding secured years ago by the late Sen. Ronald Stafford, should be ready to open in early January, if all goes well.

Woodland hopes to have 12 teams working at the center by the end of next year.

The long-term goal is to secure 18 teams of scientists, but that will require a major expansion that Woodland estimates would cost $70 million.

"Now is not the time for that," he said, noting the state of the economy worldwide. But he hopes it can happen within a few years.

"We will probably target people who work on antibodies. We don't have enough of that," he said, adding that they would like more high-level imagery, as well.