Bioterrorism research drives MSU grants and contracts to record high

Anthrax and plague are just some of the scary diseases that could end up in some terrorist’s bag of tricks.

They are also infections that can jump from animals to people, like brucellosis and salmonella, which Montana State University scientists have been investigating for some time.

By GAIL SCHONTZLER Chronicle Staff Writer

Now that Congress is pumping tons of money into bioterrorism research, MSU scientists are hoping to expand their work in the field of cross-species infections.

Finding ways to fight the viruses, bacteria and protozoan parasites that jump from animal species to humans could benefit people, wildlife and livestock. It might even help thwart terrorists.

Professor Allen Harmsen, 51, head of the veterinary molecular biology department in the College of Agriculture, is quietly leading a small band of scientists who hope to do big things.

"Twenty years ago we thought we’d conquered infectious diseases," Harmsen said. "We haven’t." Tuberculosis is making a worldwide comeback, for example, because of the AIDS epidemic and antibiotic resistance.

Bioterrorist diseases are just one of the future directions for scientists at MSU, which just closed the books this summer on another record year for research.

Tom McCoy, vice president for research, said MSU scientists and professors spent $66.3 million from grants and contracts in the past 12 months, up from the $61 million posted in each of the past two years.

"This is happening because we’ve been able to attract first-rate faculty," McCoy said.

He said exciting research projects are also being pursued on fuel cells, microbiology, lasers, solar physics, chemistry and environmental cleanup, as well as traditional agricultural research on pests and improving wheat, barley and beef.

The budget for the National Institutes for Health has doubled in the last five years to $24 billion, McCoy said, so health is one area where MSU hopes to grow.

Harmsen’s department expanded last year by more than 30 percent to $3.8 million and has significant potential, McCoy said.

While it’s true that even MSU’s weed research is being sold as a way to boost "homeland security," McCoy said every university is doing the same thing.

"Everybody and his brother is jumping on this (bioterrorism) bandwagon," Harmsen said. What makes MSU uniquely placed to attack such problems is that Montana has natural "reservoirs" of diseases like anthrax and plague, which live in wildlife and soil.

"These organisms haven’t been researched much," Harmsen said. "We’re trying to develop a center for zoonotic diseases (which jump from animals to people). We’re trying move in that direction because there’s a real need."

Harmsen, who came to MSU a year ago from the nonprofit Trudeau Institute in New York’s Adirondacks, has specialized for years in lung diseases. One thing that attracted him to MSU was the chance to work with large animals like cows, which have an immune system similar to humans and could be a better model than mice. He’s hoping to raise $5 million to build a large, super-secure lab where infected cattle or bison could be studied safely.

Winning NIH grants to work on human infections strengthens the lab’s USDA-funded work on animals, Harmsen said. There’s much more money in human diseases, and the lab equipment and cutting-edge techniques developed in human research can be applied to livestock diseases.

Meanwhile, the eight scientists in the veterinary molecular biology lab are continuing their main work of researching diseases that attack livestock and wildlife as well as humans, such as brucellosis, which infects bison, cattle and people. Harmsen is working on pneumocystis, which causes shipping fever in calves and deadly pneumonia in AIDS patients.

The scientists are also planning to move from the old Marsh Lab on South 19th Avenue into a new research lab being constructed in the Advanced Technology Park, which will be leased long term. Infectious disease that require high-level security won’t be worked on in the Tech Park.

The public shouldn’t worry about brucellosis or other nasty diseases escaping from Marsh Lab, Harmsen said. Access is limited, people must shower when they enter and leave, their clothes must be left in the lab, exhaust air is microscopically filtered, and any equipment taken out must be sterilized.

"People leaving a dirty Kleenex around are much more dangerous that working in my lab," he said.

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