What is a Regional Center of Excellence for Biodefense and Emerging Infectious Disease (RCE)?
The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID), a division of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has funded eight regional centers to conduct research on infectious agents. The University of Washington was selected in 2003 as one of these eight centers referred to as Regional Centers of Excellence for Biodefense and Emerging Infectious Disease (RCE), the only one selected on the west coast. The UW RCE includes researchers at the UW campus, Harborview Medical Center, the VA Puget Sound Health Care System, the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, the Institute for Systems Biology, the University of Idaho in Moscow, and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Hamilton, Montana. While treatments are available for the diseases currently under study at the UW RCE, vaccines to prevent them are not available, and UW researchers’ work may lead to the development of such vaccines. The infections that are studied by the UW
