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The Dartmouth
July 22, 2025 | Latest Issue
The Dartmouth

Researchers receive $1.4 mil. grant

Dartmouth Medical School professor Bruce Stanton, along with colleagues from the College's Lung Biology Center of Biomedical Research Excellence, received a four-year grant of approximately $1.4 million from the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation on May 2, Stanton said. Stanton who serves as director of the Lung Biology COBRE and is a DMS professor of microbiology and immunology will use a significant portion of the grant money to lead a team of Dartmouth researchers in continuing efforts to study the genetic disease and develop new therapies that target harmful bacteria. Stanton and his fellow researchers have received the same $1.4 million grant from the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation every four years since 1997, Stanton said. The majority of first-year funding for the group's most recent grant will be used for cell biology tests and imaging, according to Stanton.

"In kids and young adults, what really leads to a poor outcome is that they get chronic bacterial infections in their lungs, and the focus of the grant is to determine why that continues for their whole life," Stanton said.

The researchers will use deep sequencing techniques to identify bacteria based on their genes, he said. The researchers hope their findings will guide better and more effective uses of antibiotics in the future.

"What we're doing is we are obtaining sputum samples lung mucus from babies and adults with cystic fibrosis and we're using very sophisticated sequencing techniques to identify all organisms in their lungs," Stanton said. "We are following the babies for a couple months and the adults for several years."

The researchers plan to discern which bacteria are present before patients become "very sick" and require hospitalization, he said.

"We really don't know what's in those lungs, and if you know what's there you can start using the right antibiotics," Stanton said. The researchers also plan to use the grant to investigate factors beside bacteria that contribute to cystic fibrosis.

"We are also working on how environmental factors like toxins and arsenic in the drinking water affect cystic fibrosis," he said.

The Cystic Fibrosis Foundation grant also supports the projects of other COBRE researchers, including George O'Toole, a DMS professor of microbiology and immunology and associate director of Dartmouth's cystic fibrosis research program.

"[Stanton] and I have worked together for close to a decade to study how pathogens interact with host cells," O'Toole said. "My specialty is microbiology and his is host cell biology every time the host cell is exposed to a pathogen, the host responds and the pathogen responds to that response."

O'Toole, who will receive $80,000 per year over the next two years, will use his funding to generate preliminary data that he will use to apply for additional funding in the future, he said.

"It's really these pilot and feasibility projects that let us know if there are any interesting findings," O'Toole said. "These are new and innovative experiments that would be difficult otherwise to carry out."

Both Stanton and O'Toole emphasized that cystic fibrosis research depends on work from many disciplines, and relies heavily on funding from various sources to facilitate cross-discipline collaboration.

"The program really fosters interaction between investigators from different areas who focus on the same disease," O'Toole said. "It's really a team effort."

Cystic fibrosis researchers also depend on the work of physicians to understand the clinical effects of their therapies, Stanton said.

"The medical doctors [at DMS] are working with us to try new treatments in patients," Stanton said.

The researchers plan to use two drugs that are currently FDA-approved for purposes other than cystic fibrosis treatment, he explained. If the drugs work on patients, "it will be a lot cheaper and faster than developing new drugs," Stanton said.

Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center pediatrician and researcher Juliette Madan will also use part of the grant money to study newborns in order to determine how infants affected by cystic fibrosis acquire "chronic lung infections," a DMS press release said.

Representatives from the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation and peer medical schools judged grant applications based on the development of new ideas, comprehensiveness of their research and potential benefit to patients, Stanton said.