New lab removes barrier between research and patient care

What we found was effectively that there weren't any functional, readily accessible clean rooms in the region that either an academic group or a startup company could step into and begin working in. The clean room facility is a very important element in the entire pipeline or ecosystem for taking things from discovery in a laboratory to producing products that can actually help people and move into a marketplace. And so by virtue of having something like this clean room, we can undergo processes that are very highly regulated by the government, appropriately, to make sure materials are handled in a precise way so that they are clean. A clean room is a purpose-built space where airborne particles, microbial contamination, and other environmental variables are very tightly controlled. My lab has developed new therapeutic strategies for lung and cardiovascular diseases that have shown strong potential in both animal models and patient-derived cells. While these results are very promising, the next and most important step is translating this work into human patients, and this is where the clean room becomes essential. By virtue of having it here at the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute, we can make this available not only to the researchers here, but also to other researchers throughout the community and hopefully attract others to this area who may not be here yet. It's one thing to have an academic paper and to publish it in a good journal, but it's another thing to take something that you've produced in the laboratory and then translate it beyond that so that it actually becomes useful to people. The clean room is not just a facility; it is a bridge between discovery and patient care.