Heidi Goodrich-Blair has received a $400,000 award from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, as part of its program to encourage research on the interaction between disease organisms and humans. The University of Wisconsin-Madison molecular biologist will use the award to learn how some bacteria are able to evade the immune system”s first line of defense.

Goodrich-Blair hopes that findings from the study will help other scientists.

“This research may be especially useful in understanding blood-borne bacterial diseases,” Goodrich-Blair says. “These include Lyme disease, tropical diseases such as river blindness and elephantiasis, and heart worm in dogs.”

The work also may help explain why the immune system sometimes goes into overdrive and begins attacking the body”s own tissues. This phenomenon appears to contribute to multiple sclerosis, lupus, and possibly even heart disease, according to Goodrich-Blair, an assistant professor of bacteriology in the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences.

Goodrich-Blair is one of nine scientists to win an award from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund this year in a competition that included researchers from the United States and Canada. Most of the award winners will focus on how the immune system operates to kill bacteria. Instead, Goodrich-Blair wants to study how some bacteria evade the innate immune system, the body”s first line of defense.

Humans have both an innate immune system and an acquired immune system. The innate system typically is strong enough to kill many microbes including non-pathogenic forms of staphylococcus and E. coli bacteria. The acquired immune system “learns and remembers” specific infectious agents so the body can mount a rapid defense if infected again later in life

To study the innate immune system, many researchers are turning to insects. Insects make good subjects because they lack an acquired immune system and their innate immune system parallels that of humans, according to Goodrich-Blair. That means people have the same genes and regulatory pathways in their immune systems as do the monarch butterfly and mosquito.

Goodrich-Blair will study how a particular lethal bacterium manages to evade the innate immune system of the tobacco hornworm caterpillar. “It”s clear that some bacteria have the ability turn off the innate immune system. They produce compounds that inactivate some of this system”s key genes,” she says.

Goodrich-Blair believes that the genes in bacteria that switch off parts of the innate system are also logical targets for new drugs to control microbes, including antibiotic-resistant microbes. And because insects are common crop pests, her research also may lead to new methods for controlling pest insects without traditional insecticides.

Goodrich-Blair received her bachelor”s and doctoral degrees from the State University of New York at Albany. She spent three years as a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Medical School before joining the Department of Bacteriology in 1997.

The Burroughs Wellcome Fund is an independent private foundation that fosters the advancement of medical research and biological sciences. The fund supports research and other scientific and educational activities. It emphasizes the career development of biomedical scientists and advancing areas in the basic medical sciences that are underfunded, or that have a shortage of qualified researchers.