CIVIC:

DEVELOPMENT: Will Also Serve as CDC Hub, SoCal Training Facility

San Diego County is building a $93.3 million new health lab in Kearny Mesa. Due for completion in 2025, the two-story, 52,000-square-foot building replaces a 25,000-square-foot lab in Point Loma.

San Diego County's Public Health Laboratory was so jammed during the worst of the COVID pandemic that some of the equipment used to test for the virus had to be put in hallways.

“It was pretty crazy,” said Jeremy Corrigan, the lab's

director of operations.

The lab was running three shifts, 24 hours a day, processing 2,000 to 3,000 tests a day, more than twice as many COVID tests as any other public health lab in the state, Corrigan said.

For a time, the lab staff ballooned from about 45 to 125 with the addition of temporary workers to help with COVID testing, Corrigan said.

“We had fridges and freezers that were in the hallway and just plugged in anywhere we could find. We had tables propped up in the hallway for receiving specimens and getting them logged in,” Corrigan said.

To prevent that from happening again, the county is building a $93.3 million new San Diego County health lab in Kearny Mesa.

“It's going to give us more space, more capabilities, more safety and really allow us to innovate,” said. “That's really our key. We would like to be at the forefront of innovation.”

Due for completion in 2025, the two-story, 52,000-square-foot building will replace the 25,000-square-foot lab in Point Loma that dates to 1965 and has been demolished.

“Now we'll have space to add all of the equipment that we need,” Corrigan said.

Designed by Steinberg Hart, based in Los Angeles, with BNBuilders, based in Sorrento Mesa as the general contractor, the new building will have 29,000 square feet of labs and 8,000 square feet of offices.

A Training Center

Post-COVID, the lab has a full-time, permanent staff of 85, supplemented with a handful of contract workers, Corrigan said. The new building will serve as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Lab for San Diego and Imperial counties.

With the added space that the new lab has, there's room to expand the lab's services to include whole genome sequencing and tuberculosis testing.

“The biggest growth in our laboratory and also the largest piece of real estate in the new laboratory that wasn't part of our old lab is our sequencing lab,” Corrigan said. “Genomic epidemiology and sequencing is a new section that we have in our laboratory that kind of came out of COVID.”

The sequencing allows the lab to identify and track different strains of a pathogen, like COVID.

That in turn helps determine how to best treat patients and help control transmission.

“Wastewater surveillance is the other big piece that we're going to add because we have the space to do so and the space to add the equipment,” Corrigan said. “It's often an early warning detection system,” adding that, “We can often see spikes in COVID hit wastewater before it hits the clinical population or before we see it in hospitals.”

The new building will also have a training lab for prospective public health microbiologists.

“Our vision would be for us in San Diego to be the Southern California training center,” Corrigan said.

The design of the building has large exterior windows to allow natural lighting to enter and interior glass so that visitors can see what's happening in the individual labs without entering, which, in some cases, would require protective clothing.

Subtle Touches

There are also some subtle touches, like different color floor tiles to indicate areas where particularly hazardous samples are being tested.

Also new is a necropsy space to test animals for diseases, such as rabies, that can be transmitted to people.

To help cover the costs of the lab, the county is consolidating some of its services, freeing up an existing four-story building rather than building a new one that would have cost $130 million. About 600 workers are being relocated.

Some of that money also will be used to build a $33.8 million parking garage on the Kearny Mesa campus with more than 700 spaces and up to 260 electric vehicle charging stations.

Solar panels on the new lab building and the parking garage will produce about 60% of the electricity for the lab.

Until the new lab is finished, the lab staff is “working out of trailers and a mobile laboratory right now to bridge the gap to the new laboratory,” Corrigan said. ■