Balancing sustainability with safety in gene therapy research

The King’s Centre for Gene Therapy & Regenerative Medicine is rising to this challenge and striking the balance between maintaining standards whilst introducing new approaches to improve sustainability. It consists of eleven labs working in diverse areas of stem-cell research and on a range of diseases such as diabetes, skin fibrosis and acute liver failure. For the last three years it has achieved Gold status in the LEAF accreditation, embedding sustainability across the Centre by ensuring responsibility for this aspect of work lies with a member from each lab.

“I think it is something that we are all proud of in the Centre,” says Fernanda Suzano, technical manager at the Centre. “We have a member of each lab in the sustainability team which helps to foster uptake because they bring all the suggestions and guidance back to their labs.” Each member of the sustainability team is also instrumental in the LEAF process itself and have accountability for different criteria in the accreditation process.

Freezing and heating

Together with Lab manager Heather Wilson, Fernanda has implemented a number of initiatives into the Centre to improve its sustainability. They have reduced the number of freezers and optimised those in use by increasing the temperature from -80C to -70C where they can and re-organising the contents. Along with other labs at King’s they entered the international Freezer Challenge competition which has helped provide the impetus for many of the measures and they also won an internal King’s award in this area for ‘influence’ which commended their collaboration with other labs and sharing of best practices.

Another initiative that the team have adopted is the exchanging water baths for dry baths. The use of metallic beads to heat and defrost cultures improves energy efficiency by about 50% and avoids the contamination of traditional water baths. This approach is being introduced into labs around King’s with support of the Sustainable Research team.

Water efficiency

Staying on the theme of water, the team are also putting in place measures around water to reduce wastage by ensuring that the different types of water are used for the correct purpose. There are three main types of water used in laboratories - ultrapure, purified and primary grade – which have each gone through different levels of processing and therefore have different sustainability implications.

Ultrapure is used for cell culturing whilst purified is used for diluting samples and primary grade is used for rinsing and other preparation.  The team at the Centre for Gene Therapy & Regenerative Medicine are working on labelling and training to ensure people know which water is used for which purpose. 

“It’s quite a challenge to address the mentality behind water use,” comments Heather. ”Firstly I think in our area of research people tend to be cautious and use the purest form of water to be sure to avoid contamination. And secondly there is a general unconscious belief that water is easily accessible. We hope to build awareness of the environmental - and financial - impact of using different forms of water to ensure researchers only use the purer forms when necessary.”

Working with waste

The team are also looking to further improve their waste and recycling. They have introduced recycling of general waste where possible in the labs which has been received well. In terms of recycling single use plastic or replacing plastic items with more sustainable options the team faces challenges due to the sensitivity of the cells used in the Centre’s research, which sometimes react even to changes in the product brand. “Reducing single use plastic is a big part of LEAF,” says Fernanda. “But it’s difficult to explain our particular challenges and the reasons why researchers prefer to stick to single-use plastic.”

In addition to the three types of bins for general, recyclable and clinical waste the Centre is hoping to introduce bins for offensive waste which lies between general and clinical waste, which would reduce the amount of waste that goes for incineration. This is a general move that King’s wants to introduce across its laboratories but needs consideration when working with labs embedded in its partner NHS Foundation Trusts.

Fernanda and Heather are keen to accompany the changes in waste management with a QR code system where beside each bin, water station and piece of equipment there is a code that can be scanned to access the standard operating procedures or guidance for disposal.

They would also like to introduce a similar system for chemicals and samples where scanning the code provides guidance on disposal and can also read into an online inventory of supplies to enable more efficient use of chemicals across the Centre. “An online inventory is top of my wishlist,” says Fernanda. “To be able to keep track of everything electronically would make us super-efficient and provide an easy way for researchers to be mindful about chemicals and other materials.”