Structural biologist Angela M. Gronenborn, just back from a trip to Greece, opened the door to her Oakland office last week and found it empty.

Lake Fong, Post-Gazette Mike Delk, manager of Pitt's nuclear magnetic resonance lab, at his new facility in the Biomedical Science Tower 3 building on Fifth Avenue in Oakland. Click photo for larger image.

"I guess I've moved," she said to herself.

She had indeed, becoming one of the first faculty occupants of Biomedical Science Tower 3, the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine's new 10-story laboratory building on Fifth Avenue, Oakland.

The $205 million building will officially open today, though most of the nearly 500 scientists, graduate students and support staff it will house have yet to move in. Its loading dock is bustling as new lab equipment arrives and boxes bound for research offices are off-loaded.

When complete, the building will feature 10,000 tanks to support the largest zebra fish colony in the world -- the fish are a favorite for genetic studies -- and a Biosafety Level 3 lab, a highly secured and isolated facility capable of handling exotic and potentially deadly bacteria and viruses. Its occupants will pursue such activities as vaccine development, drug discovery and bioengineering.

The building is being financed through a variety of private, state, federal and university money, including $42 million of dedicated Pitt funds, $18.8 million from the Pittsburgh Life Sciences Greenhouse, $17.5 million in state capital budget funds and $21.6 million from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for construction of the biocontainment lab. The university also is taking on $80 million in debt.

"There are exciting possibilities in a building like this," Dr. Gronenborn said last week as she was settling into her first-floor office. The view out her window of bumper-to-bumper traffic is decidedly humdrum, but she was thinking of the $12 million facility that lay under her feet.

The cavernous basement room houses three powerful magnets -- soon to be five magnets, with room for a sixth -- for use in nuclear magnetic resonance, or NMR, spectroscopy. She and colleagues in the new department of structural biology that she chairs want to know the three-dimensional shape and composition of all sorts of biological molecules too small to be seen under a light microscope; NMR spectroscopy is one of the primary tools they will use.

Knowing the structure of cells and their components is crucial to the emerging field known as molecular medicine. Researchers are increasingly guided by structure as they probe the underlying causes of diseases and develop drugs that counteract them.

The protease inhibitors that have revolutionized the treatment of AIDS, for instance, were designed and optimized based on structural information, said Dr. Gronenborn, whose own research has focused on HIV and HIV-related proteins.

"Not even a handful" of other labs have the array of high-powered magnets that the new biomedical tower will house, said Dr. Gronenborn, who works with similar equipment at the National Institutes of Health. Before joining Pitt last fall, she headed the structural biology group at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases for 13 years.

Each of the superconducting magnets, housed in 6-foot-high vacuum bottles called "dewars," weighs 3 to 5 tons. The least powerful of them produces a magnetic field of 16.4 Tesla -- a typical magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, scanner at a hospital might have a 2-Tesla magnet, with some now boasting 3-Tesla magnets. The most powerful of the new Pitt machines, yet to arrive, will have a 20.5-Tesla magnet.

"We can look at systems now that 10 years ago we could not have," Dr. Gronenborn said.

Such powerful magnets require special care. Their magnetic fields are so strong that loose iron tools or other items can become airborne if they come too close, said Michael Delk, NMR lab manager. The room is constructed of non-magnetic materials like aluminum and wood; even the rebar in the surrounding concrete is nonmagnetic.

Signs near the entrance doors warn visitors not to carry loose metal objects and to take care with magnetic-stripe credit cards. Even so, Dr. Gronenborn noticed suspicious metal shavings on the window sills as she climbed a spiral staircase leading out of the labs.

"People think we're paranoid, but we're not," she said, making a note to check on the shavings.

The magnets pose other peculiar safety concerns. Mr. Delk noted that the lab's generous size -- the ceiling is at least 25 feet high -- isn't just to accommodate magnetic fields, but to provide a margin of safety for humans if something would disrupt the magnet's cryogenic coolant.

The magnets are cooled to near absolute zero by an inner bath of liquid helium and an outer bath of liquid nitrogen. If sudden heating caused the liquids to turn to gas, the helium will expand seven times and could displace much or all of the oxygen in the room, he said.

NMR spectroscopy is just one of the tools used by structural biologists. Unlike other methods, such as crystallography or electron microscopy, NMR analysis doesn't require that samples be immobilized, so it can show how the structures move, Dr. Gronenborn said.

Biomedical Science Tower 3 also presents increased potential for interaction between researchers, she said, noting that Pitt's computational biology and drug discovery groups also will be housed there.