Spain can boast of having a pharmaceutical sector that is a benchmark at the European level, but also with great milestones beyond the old continent. Good proof of this is that our country will host the first laboratory with the highest biosafety level (BSL-4) that the pharmaceutical industry will have worldwide. It will be in Madrid and will be a reality at the end of 2024 thanks to the promotion of the biopharmaceutical company GSK, which will develop it in its facilities at the Tres Cantos Global Health R&D center (Madrid).

A biosafety laboratory is an infrastructure with an environment specifically designed to work safely with biological agents that may represent a risk to human, animal or environmental health.

The novelty of the new center lies, precisely, in that it will allow working in biosafety conditions with level 4 pathogens, that is, with biological agents that can cause serious illness, can be easily transmitted from one individual to another, directly or indirectly, and for which there are no effective treatments or prevention methods, such as vaccines.

Specifically, it is planned that the new BSL-4 laboratory will investigate the effectiveness of the new treatments that are being developed against microorganisms that have acquired resistance that makes current treatments ineffective. For example, multidrug-resistant tuberculosis, one of the great current challenges in global health. On the other hand, this facility will serve as a tool to confront future epidemics or pandemics currently unknown, as occurred with Covid-19, for which, currently, there are no effective treatments or prevention measures, as they are new.

In addition to Level 3 considerations, BSL-4 laboratories have more advanced containment requirements, such as staff changing clothes before entering and showering when leaving; all materials must be decontaminated before leaving; no work or manipulation is performed on samples outside an isolator that are not inactivated; Personnel must use isolators in which the biological sample will always be contained or the use of class III biological safety cabinets.

• The first in the world

Thanks to all this, the new center being developed in Madrid will be the first BSL-4 laboratory of a pharmaceutical company in the world.

Thanks to the development of such a laboratory, the future is more promising, since it will be an important tool to try to change the trajectory of infectious diseases that disproportionately affect the most vulnerable populations, being a privileged place within the global research landscape. and one of the collaborators of choice for the most prestigious scientific projects, who is advancing to have a positive impact on the health of more than 2.5 billion people by the end of 2030.