The Containment Level 3 (CL3) facility, located in the basement of the Pathology Support Building, allows users to work on the predominantly sexually transmitted pathogen HIV-1 (the virus that causes AIDS) and the aerosol-transmitted pathogen SARS-CoV-2 (the coronavirus responsible for the Covid19 pandemic).  The work takes place in two dedicated rooms that branch off from a service area housing a microscope for live-cell imaging.

The facility is managed by Dr Rebecca Moore and currently supports 12 scientists doing cutting edge research on SARS-CoV-2 and HIV-1 for a number of research groups around Oxford University and the wider community. As well as running their own research, each of the named researchers below dedicates a significant proportion of their time to enabling activities that are the core of Oxford University’s proportionate research response to the recent SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. This is a highly collaborative effort that requires the dedication of these highly trained individuals to support the translational research response of the wider scientific community.  Individuals involved: Prof William James, Michael Knight (Fodor lab), Javier Gilbert-Jaramillo (James lab), Marko Noerenberg and Manuel Garcia-Moreno(Castello lab), Maeva Dupont and Rebecca Moore (Sattentau lab), Michelle Hill and Juliane Brun (Zitzmann lab), Peter Wing and Alan Zhuang (McKeating lab) and Lise Chauveau (Rehwinkel lab). 

These individuals are supporting the scientific goals of their own research groups as well as those of the following research groups: Prof Peter Simmonds, Prof Peijun Zhang, Prof Gavin Screaton, Prof Alan Townsend, Prof Andrew Pollard, Dr Tanmay Bharat, Dr Ivan Ahel, Dr Nicole Robb and Oxford Nanoimaging.

The work is supported by grants from the Medical Sciences Division Covid19 Research Response Fund, the MRC, the Maria Sklodowska-Curie fund, and equipment loans from Oxford Nanoimaging (microscope) and Olympus (cell culture analysers).