CAS Vice President Chen Zhu and Wuhan Mayor Li Xiansheng signed an agreement on July 23 to jointly establish China's first P4 lab in the capital city of Central China's Hubei Province.
In biology, different security labs exist (from the P4 to the P0) to work with different dangers. In a P4 lab, researchers work with the most dangerous biological samples. Because it is expensive to set up and maintain, the number of such labs is not many. A renowned non-military P4 lab in Europe is Jean Merieum Lab, a leading research laboratory for the study of highly contagious viruses.
The CAS Wuhan Institute of Virology is the only comprehensive institute carrying out the fundamental researches on general virology in China. Its P3 lab has been a major base for SARS research in this country over the past several months.
