Vital Signs:
NH-wide lung disease
research collaborative
is funded by the feds
Succeeding in academia today means bringing in research funding. But what's a junior faculty member do when the competition for grants is so fierce that even the most senior faculty struggle to be awarded funding?
Luckily, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has created a program that makes funding more accessible to junior faculty The COBRE (Centers of Biomedical Research Excellence) program is designed to augment and strengthen the biomedical research capabilities of small or rural states and to enhance the scientific expertise of junior faculty in those regions.
Lung: Earlier this year, DMS and a team of other New Hampshire researchers received a $12- million COBRE grant to establish an interdisciplinary research center on lung diseases. The grant is supporting research at Dartmouth Medical School, Dartmouth College, and Keene State College, in collaboration with the state of New Hampshire's Departments of Environmental Services and of Health and Human Services. This isn't the first COBRE grant that DMS has received. In 2001, the NIH awarded the Medical School $11.6 million to fund research and establish a center on the immune mechanisms that control inflammation and cancer.
COBRE grants support faculty mentoring by pairing junior faculty with senior colleagues, by establishing training for graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, and by developing closer research ties among collaborators. Senior Dartmouth faculty are serving as investigators, leaders, and mentors on this project, and Dartmouth and Keene junior faculty are heading the individual research projects.
With the help of COBREfunded guidance, junior faculty "become more competitive for grants in the long run," says physiologist Bruce Stanton, Ph.D., the director of the new COBRE project, called the Dartmouth Lung Biology Center.
Five: The center includes five multidisciplinary projects on the cellular and molecular mechanisms of lung disease. Three focus on cystic fibrosis (CF), one of the most prevalent genetic diseases in the U.S.; one in 25 individuals is a CF carrier.
Two other projects involve environmental factors that contribute to lung diseases, including lung cancer, which accounts for over 30 percent of all cancer deaths in New Hampshire. Investigators on these two projects will work with state agencies to examine the effects of agents such as arsenic, radon, nickel, and diesel exhaust.
The grant will support the recruitment of faculty and the development of a new, state-of-theart technical facility in proteomics to enable scientists to study the location, structure, and function of the proteins involved in these lung diseases.
Effects: The CF researchers are studying how bacteria infect the lungs of patients with the disease; investigating how mutations in CFTR, the gene that is altered in patients with CF, cause the disease; and doing a structural analysis of proteins that modulate the function of the CFTR protein. The lung-cancer researchers are investigating the effects of air pollution on lung disease, including cancer, and conducting an environmental epidemiology study of lung cancer in the state.
Science has become so complex that the lone researcher is unlikely to be competitive. "You could be the best cell biologist in the world, but if you're not collaborating with four or five experts who are the leading people in their field," you're not likely to succeed, Stanton contends. "We're collaborating with some NMR [nuclear magnetic imaging] people. We're collaborating with some structural biologists. We're collaborating with chemists," he continues. "I could never get that expertise in NMR, xray crystallography, drug discovery and design, chemistry. It takes 20 years of training to get where you need to be.
"So if you can bring all those experts [together] in a collaborative way, and build a group, everybody gets better," Stanton concludes. "The whole institution gets better."
Laura Stephenson Carter
If you would like to offer any feedback about this article, we would welcome getting your comments at DartMed@Dartmouth.edu.