New Argonne Research Facility Could Bring 1,000 Jobs to Area

Argonne National Laboratory broke ground Tuesday on a research facility that lab officials said could bring more than 1,000 jobs to the area.

The $34.5 million Advanced Protein Crystallization Facility will serve as a key research site for drugs that combat bacterial infections such as staph, tuberculosis, E. coli and anthrax.

Argonne officials said they expect the facility to maintain 550 research and support jobs during its first five years, generating $52 million for Illinois’ economy. 

More than 800 temporary jobs will be associated with the building’s construction, they said. The building is scheduled for completion in 2014.

U.S. Rep. Judy Biggert, R-13th District, said the facility would help both the state as well as the nation stay at the forefront of innovation.

“For decades Argonne has been the leader in addressing our nation’s biggest challenges, from national security to biological systems to material sciences to energy,” Biggert said. “The new facility will offer Argonne the capability to broaden its potential for more important discoveries that fight diseases and save lives.”

The Advanced Protein Crystallization Facility will be used to form protein crystals employed in antibiotic research, said Andrzej Joachimiak, director of the Structural Biology Center and Midwest Center for Structural Genomics. The Midwest Center for Structural Genomics is a consortium that includes Argonne, Northwestern University, University College London and others.

Researchers X-ray the crystals to figure out protein structures, which then allow them to determine how drugs bind with various bacteria, Joachimiak said.

Though it used to take three to four years to figure out the structures, scientists now can do so in a matter of minutes.

The crystals, which at their largest are smaller than the thickness of a human hair, are very fragile and hard to create. 

“The biggest bottleneck is to get the crystals,” Joachimiak said. “That’s why we’re building (the Advanced Protein Crystallization Facility) — to get crystals more efficiently.”

The Advanced Protein Crystallization Facility will be adjacent to the Department of Energy’s Strucural Biology Center, which houses the X-ray technology used in the crystal research.

Argonne is already one of the most efficient protein research facilities in the world, Director Eric Isaacs said. Structural Biology Center researchers determine roughly 1,400 protein structures in 2010. Argonne’s goal with the Advanced Protein Crystallization Facility is to accelerate that.

“We will be focused on high throughput — so the idea is to discover not just one or two proteins but many proteins,” Isaacs said. “That’s one of the key things this facility will enable.” 

The lab expects to bring in anywhere from $400 million to $600 million in funding from grants and industry investment over the next 10 years to enable that research, he said. 

State Rep. Jim Durkin, R-82nd District, said that he knows the state’s initial investment in the facility will help expand Illinois’ economy. 

“Argonne is a critical asset for this region and for the entire state,” he said. 

From a researcher’s standpoint, investment in the facility shows a commitment to core biological inquiry, protein crystallographer Norma Duke said.

“This stuff is the backbone of biology at this point,” she said.