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UW pediatrician wins award

University of Wisconsin pediatrician Bruce S. Klein has been awarded the National Institutes of Health's Method to Extend Research in Time award, which will fund his research for 10 years, officials announced Monday.

Klein said his research focuses on "dimorphic fungi," which he describes as fungi that have the ability to "switch back and forth between two forms."

"I'm interested in infectious disease, and fungi are an important class of pathogens that affect people and other mammals," Klein said.

According to Klein, dimorphic fungi exist in a mold form in the soil and can be dispersed into the air when the soil is disturbed.

"[In the soil], the mold form reproduces and bears spores, which is the infectious particle of the organism," Klein said. "And when these are physically disturbed in the environment, the spores can be inhaled."

After being inhaled, Klein said, the spores settle in the smallest areas of the lung, where they undergo their transformation.

"At an elevated temperature, this initiates a dramatic morphologic transition and they change over to the yeast form," Klein said.

This yeast form can cause pneumonia in children and adults. Klein said it is also responsible for "valley fever," a disease he has found to be prevalent in the southwestern United States. Klein's research focuses on preventing this transformation from occurring.

"The fungi have to undergo this morphologic transition to survive in the host," Klein said. "If you block this transition through chemical means, then you fix the organisms in the mold or spore form and they are not pathogenic at all."

Klein said he studies the genetics of the fungi to determine how to interrupt this transition and stop it from occurring.

"We study basically the microbe's strategies for [becoming] a pathogen in various different ways," Klein said. "We study how it's regulated at its genetic level … how the genes work as far as damaging host cells, evading host immune responses and gaining a foothold in a host."

Klein added the fungi can live in the body in a benign form before being activated into the full-blown pathogenic form.

"They can reside in a dormant form in the body for years, if not decades, [and morph] at some later date," Klein said. "For example, if the immune system is impaired, these microbes can reactivate."

Dr. Christopher Green, a UW Medical School professor, said Klein's research and character made him an excellent selection for this award.

"He's a dedicated scientist-clinician. He spends most of his time in the laboratory working on his research," Green said. "That's why he got the MERIT Award."

Green said Klein's discoveries will be very useful in the medical world, especially as he gets further along in his research.

"[When] he and his research group learn more about the life-cycle development and genetics of blastomycosis growth, this could be applicable to other fungal conditions that affect people," Green said.