With support from the Hitchcock Foundation's inaugural Program Project Grant (HF-PPG), biochemist Dean R. Madden, PhD, will lead a diverse team of Dartmouth researchers in the search for clues to how bacterial and fungal infections conspire to clog the breathing systems of patients with maladies such as cystic fibrosis.

"These bugs can pack themselves together very densely," says Madden, a professor of biochemistry at Dartmouth Medical School (DMS). "They embed themselves in a matrix and then they turn on gene programs that change their metabolic state so that they become very resistant to antibiotics."

The grant provides $200,000 over two years, an amount that Dartmouth's Lung Biology Center of Biomedical Research Excellence (COBRE) has offered to match. The COBRE, of which Madden is associate director, also will provide the HF-PPG team with free access to its Core facilities. ...

In addition to DMS colleagues, the HF-PPG team also will join forces with bioengineering researchers from Dartmouth's Thayer School of Engineering. Madden notes that an ongoing culture of collaboration among disciplines and schools at Dartmouth played a key role in developing the team.