Excerpts from the article "As attacks escalate, Iran’s universities become targets" published in Science, Vol 392, Issue 6794, by Richard Stone:

…, an explosion ripped through the Pasteur Institute of Iran, the country’s leading public health research center, obliterating key labs and biological collections. “Miraculously, no member of our staff was harmed” in the attack, Pasteur’s director, epidemiologist Ehsan Mostafavi, told Science. It appears, he adds, that no pathogens escaped from the facility, which is located in the heart of Tehran.

... The Pasteur Institute in Paris established the center in 1920, after the 1918–19 Spanish flu pandemic. It conducted disease surveillance and produced vaccines against rabies, smallpox, and other diseases. In 1946, in an amicable split, Iran’s government took over the Tehran branch, which continued to collaborate with its Paris parent.

In recent years, Pasteur has run a national reference center for cholera, tuberculosis, and other diseases. It produces vaccines against hepatitis B, measles, and COVID-19. And it is a member of the Pasteur Network, an alliance of 32 institutes around the world that share early warning data about outbreaks.

… The institute lost national reference labs, World Health Organization collaborating centers for rabies and for vector-borne diseases, its virology lab and vaccination unit, and collections of tissue samples and recombinant strains of bacteria and viruses. It was “infrastructure that had taken decades of effort to establish and equip,” Mostafavi says. So far, he says, poststrike monitoring has shown “no microbiological or biohazard” threat.

…Mostafavi says Pasteur will use satellite branches to continue to provide diagnostic services, vaccinations, and coordination of Iran’s public health laboratories. But the loss of its core facilities has left many of its top scientists adrift, he says. “Once conditions stabilize, we will rebuild this institution,” he vows. “And, God willing, make it better than before.”

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