San Diego County to open $93 million public health laboratory in spring 2025

Construction crews are hard at work inside San Diego County's new public health laboratory, county news staff reported, and county officials say the $93,000,000 facility will open in spring 2025.

County health officials say the laboratory will expand diagnostic testing for infectious diseases, environmental testing for food and water safety and rabies, genomic sequencing and wastewater surveillance. "We test for infectious disease, things like measles, mumps, norovirus to identify a potential outbreak, and then mitigate that outbreak," a public health laboratory official said.

The new building will include a mix of biosafety level 2 and biosafety level 3 laboratory spaces, enabling work on higher-risk organisms. "This is a high containment facility, which means we have a mix of bio safety level 2 and bio safety level 3, laboratory spaces throughout this building," the public health laboratory official said. The official listed organisms and agents the lab will be configured to test for, saying, "Those are things like bacillus anthracis that causes anthrax, yersinia pestis that causes the plague. We also test for ricin toxin, for example."

Officials said the lab will also expand genomic capabilities and on-site wastewater testing. "Another exciting addition, a genomic epi and sequencing laboratory," a public health laboratory official said. "Sequencing is really the wave of the future and is really going to be an important tool for us here in the public health to us to both further identify and characterize pathogens and the things that are circulating in our community." The official said wastewater surveillance will watch for pathogens such as MPOX, H5N1 and hepatitis A to provide an early warning before cases show up in clinical settings.

A project representative described building systems and sustainability features. "Right here, we have our exhaust fans. They're actually strobic units and they're specific for the laboratory areas. Specifically designed to essentially pull air from the lab spaces. We have our electric boilers as part of the county's sustainability policy. No natural gas is being provided to the building, so everything is electric," the project representative said.

County materials describe the project as providing resources to support and protect San Diego County's public health, including emergency and bioterrorism preparedness. The facility's walls are currently open and laboratories empty of equipment, county news staff reported, but officials said equipment installation and commissioning will follow ahead of the planned spring 2025 opening.

"With all the exciting capabilities, the grand opening can't come soon enough," Anita Lightfoot, a reporter for the San Diego County News Center, said.