When news broke that an unknown and dangerous virus had reached US shores and was rapidly spreading, researchers at BU didn’t blink. By mid-March 2020, they were already working with live samples of the novel coronavirus at the National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories (NEIDL).

“NEIDL was built to be able to study emerging infectious diseases and respond to national emergencies,” says Director Ronald Corley, chair and professor of microbiology at the School of Medicine. “This pandemic has demonstrated the value of having a facility like NEIDL and all the expertise that we’ve brought into it.”

Built in 2008, NEIDL is a state-of-the-art research facility that supports the work of investigators who focus on infectious diseases that are—or have the potential to become—major public health concerns. It is one of only a handful of facilities in the United States that houses biosafety level 2 (BSL-2), BSL-3, and BSL-4 laboratories, which are designed to permit investigators to work safely with these emerging pathogens. NEIDL is owned and operated by Boston University but is also one component of a national network of secure facilities that studies emerging infectious diseases.

Since the COVID-19 outbreak, NEIDL scientists dropped nearly every other research project to focus on understanding and combating the novel coronavirus.

BU researchers quickly received $1.6 million in new funding through Harvard from the Massachusetts Consortium on Pathogen Readiness to further advance coronavirus research, from modeling infections in lung organoids to developing better and faster testing to screening thousands of drug compounds in search of new treatments.

During the pandemic, global vaccine development focused heavily on activating immune cells—B cells—which are responsible for creating antibodies. But with the mutating variants, NEIDL researchers are now looking at other ways human cells activate the immune system in response to SARS-CoV-2 infection, specifically T cells, considered the body’s killers as they are sent out to destroy infected cells.

Along with colleagues from the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, BU researchers have been studying the types of “red flags” the human body uses to enlist the help of T cells. Their findings, published in Cell in June 2021, could open the door to even more effective and powerful vaccines against the coronavirus and its rapidly emerging variants.

“We swung into full action right away because my laboratory had already generated human cell lines that could be readily infected with SARS-CoV-2,” says Mohsan Saeed, a NEIDL virologist and a co-corresponding author of the paper. “This virus wants to go undetected by the immune system for as long as possible. Once it’s noticed by the immune system, it’s going to be eliminated, and it doesn’t want that.”