The Wayne State University School of Medicine’s newly established Center for Emerging and Infectious Diseases lab has received Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments certification.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services regulates all laboratory testing (except research) performed on humans in the United States through the Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments. The CLIA program ensures the quality of laboratory testing and is necessary before a laboratory can accept human samples for diagnostic testing.

The Center for Emerging and Infectious Diseases laboratory is the first instance of a CLIA certification issued for a laboratory specifically in the name of WSU and is one of only a handful of CLIA-certified laboratories in Detroit.

“This is a great step forward for the center” said Teena Chopra, M.D., M.P.H., center co-director and medical director of the lab. “The Center for Emerging and Infectious Diseases lab is a critical resource for disease identification, surveillance and research, including research into the SARS-COV2 virus as well as multi-drug resistant infections.”

Hossein Salimnia, Ph.D., professor of Pathology and the technical director of the laboratory, the CLIA application was very well received. “This was one of the smoothest and fastest approvals I’ve been associated with. The lab will be used for early identification of outbreaks and infection prevention in the community, detection of new variants and the development of vaccines,” he said.

WSU received $4.3 million from the Michigan Sequencing Academic Partnership for Public Health Innovation and Response, or MI-SAPPHIRE, provided through a U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Epidemiology and Laboratory Capacity grant received by the state Department of Health and Human Services.

The laboratory will strengthen WSU’s collaborative response to emerging and infectious diseases in partnership with the City of Detroit Health Department and the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services.