Biosafety Bulletin Vol 3 Issue 1 – April 2016

A quarterly newsletter from the BU Office of Institutional Biosafety Committee
See the PDF of the April 2016 Biosafety Bulletin

NIH Site Visit

On February 24, 2016, NIH Office of Science Policy visited Boston University as a part of their decade long program to engage with and to evaluate performance of the IBCs around the country. They reviewed institutional documents pertaining to recombinant DNA and synthetic nucleic acid molecule research program, interviewed IBC chair, Institutional official, biosafety officer, IBC office staff, attending veterinarian and selected principal investigators. They commanded BU IBC program for running it as required by NIH and above. They only had minor issues with re-wording of one policy document and clarification on two mice bite incidents. IBC has addressed those issues.

ROHP clearance no longer tied to IBC approval

In a major policy change, the Research Compliance office announced that IBC will no longer withhold approval of new, 3-year or annual renewal of IBC protocols until ROHP clearance of all personnel are obtained. Going forward, the onus will be on the PI to make sure that individuals in the protocol have received medical clearance or have completed annual update before they start any laboratory work. PIs must assure in their applications that they agree to this policy. We expect that such policy change will help better adherence of the PIs to the compliance requirements.

IBC Member Training Sessions

The IBC organized two training sessions during this past quarter to educate committee members on cutting edge technologies and animal field research practices. They included: 1) CRISPR/Cas9 Technology in Biological Research and 2) Fieldwork on Wild Orangutans: BioSafety Considerations. University faculties those are expert on the field, were invited to speak on these topics.

Changes in IBC

IBC members Dr. J. Levin (Director of Animal Science Center) and Dr. W. He (Manager of Research Safety) have recently left Boston University. Another member Dr. K. Kirsch (Associate Professor of Biochemistry) has stepped down from her role. IBC appreciates their years of dedicated service to the committee. Dr. Erin Sawyer has been appointed as a new member to the committee as Attending Veterinarian.

Tips

• When submitting any IBC protocol in RIMS, make sure to choose appropriate submission type in the ‘Overview and Grants Funding Information’ section. RIMS will continue to send reminders if correct submission type is not chosen.
• Annual renewals are due by the anniversary date of original or 3-year application approval date. If your annual renewal has been approved earlier than the required date and you choose to submit an amendment before the original anniversary date, RIMS will AGAIN start sending reminders asking you to submit annual renewal. To avoid these perplexing reminders, you must still choose ‘Annual Renewal’ as the submission type in this case.
• Boston Public Health Commission (BPHC) policy requires that all rDNA work must be registered with the institutional IBC. As such, even if you are doing something that are considered exempt according to NIH Guidelines for recombinant DNA and synthetic nucleic acids (such as cloning genes from risk group 1 [RG1] organisms in RG1 vectors such as E. coli K12 or C. elegans), you must still submit your research protocol to IBC via RIMS for approval.
• If you are adding a new BSL2 agent in your IACUC protocol, such as new pathogenic bacteria or virus, animal injection of human/non-human primate cell lines or viral vectors, that has not been mentioned previously in your IBC protocol, make sure you submit an appropriate amendment of your IBC protocol. Your IACUC protocol may not be approved until this is done.