The novel COVID-19 pandemic prompted an unprecedented Institutional reaction to aggregate existing capacity from silos of research laboratories to establish a multidisciplinary research laboratory for COVID19 testing. In less than two weeks, resources were mobilized from the community to strengthen public health response and epidemic control. Such strengthening of institutional research capacity to support public health response contributes to a natural knowledge transfer, facilitates collaboration, and generates new frontiers for knowledge production that should ultimately lead to professional development and retention of skilled human resources. This report describes the pre-established mechanisms and involvement of the authors that made it possible to set-up a multidisciplinary laboratory in a remarkably short period of time. We also discuss the opportunities and sustainability of multidisciplinary laboratory research post-COVID19. Existing institutional capacity can be repurposed to establish multidisciplinary research laboratories to support the strengthening of basic and clinical translational research capacity in resource limited settings and impact on public health and scientific knowledge for socioeconomic development.