Along with Dr. MacDonald Wood, Dr. William Ray “Bill” Price co-founded the Arizona Burn Center in 1965 at Maricopa General Hospital. Today, the Level I Burn Center, now part of the Maricopa Medical Center, is the second largest burn unit in North America. Sadly, Bill Price died when Lance was 11 years old.

In his father’s absence, the boy often found himself rummaging in his father’s den, starting what would become a lifelong pursuit of discovery and service to others.

“In many ways,” said Price, “my father’s home office became a retreat for me after he died. I would play with his stuff and look at his old slides. I didn’t know what I was looking at, but it planted in my mind the idea that I should be doing something to help people.’’

After graduating from Phoenix’s Maryvale High School, Price began what he thought might be a pre-med track by earning a bachelor’s degree in microbiology from Northern Arizona University (NAU). But it was in his first microbiology course at NAU that Price found his calling.

It was at NAU that Price first came to the attention of Dr. Paul Keim, an NAU Professor of Biology, the Cowden Endowed Chair in Microbiology, and Director of NAU’s Center for Microbial Genetics and Genomics, and Director of TGen North.

When asked of that first meeting, Dr. Keim recalls a somewhat undisciplined 20-year-old undergraduate student in his molecular genetics class with a passion for science. It wasn’t long after that Dr. Keim hired Price as a graduate student technician to work on anthrax diagnostics and molecular epidemiology.

“Lance was great, both in the lab and at a keyboard. We co-wrote my very first RO1 grant submission on anthrax, which was one of the few funded National Institutes of Health grants on that subject prior to 2001,” said Dr. Keim, one of the world’s foremost authorities on infectious disease. “In addition, my most highly-cited paper was one where Lance did lab work and co-wrote with me. Two decades later, he still has that wild passion for science, though now tempered with the discipline of a highly-driven scientist.”

The prospect of working with experts on plague, anthrax and other deadly pathogens fascinated Price. “Working in Paul’s lab provided an opportunity where I could actually accomplish something directly relevant to human health.’’

Others noticed Price’s work, too. Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore recruited Price and it was there he earned a Ph.D. in Environmental Health Sciences. At Hopkins, he focused on the risks to human health from the use of antibiotics in food animal production, specifically on the threat of drug-resistant infections in people. His expertise in the area eventually led to Congressional testimony on the subject in July 2009.

Even though he was back East, Price continued to collaborate and publish with Dr. Keim, who after TGen formed in 2002 became Director of the Pathogen Genomics Division at TGen North in Flagstaff.

“Paul kept telling me about TGen and I became excited,” said Dr. Price. “I introduced him to the head of infectious diseases at Hopkins Bayview and it didn’t take long before we looked at each other and said ‘Hey, there are a lot of things we can do together.’”

Soon after, Dr. Price found himself splitting time between John Hopkins and TGen North. He traveled back and forth between the coasts for nearly a year before joining TGen full-time in March 2008.

“Paul had state-of-the-art equipment,’’ he said. “And TGen provided the support I needed to start taking the science in new directions.’’

In the past year, Dr. Price has made significant advancements in infectious disease research, especially in developing rapid microbial DNA tests and discovering the full extent of bacteria communities in chronic wounds, such as those that plague many diabetics.

Dr. Price conducts DNA sequence-based analyses, enabling him to determine all the forms of microbial life that exist in the wound. He discovered that wounds have as many as 30 different types of bacteria — complex microbiological communities heavily colonized by anaerobic bacteria, previously undetected using a microscope or cultures in a Petri dish.

His findings raise interesting questions about what should be done. Should we eliminate all bacteria? Maybe not, he cautions.

“The body is a walking ecosystem. We cannot survive without the good bacteria that live on and in us,’’ Dr. Price said. “When you apply a broad-spectrum antibiotic to a wound’s microbial community, the susceptible bacteria are going to die off, but the resistant ones are going to rise up. You might modify the community in a bad way.’’

What Dr. Price seeks is a more targeted approach to treating wounds; to identify the good bacteria from the bad; to find ways to enrich the good and exclude the bad. But for more than half a century, modern medicine has been dependent on broad-spectrum antibiotics.

“The future may be to use more narrow spectrum, targeted anti-microbial approaches,” Dr. Price said, especially with the rise of MRSA (Methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus) and other multi-drug-resistant infections.

“Resistance is changing the landscape of medicine. It’s changing the landscape of how you handle an infection. MRSA is just one organism. There’s lots of them, and we’re trying to get ahead of the curve.’’

While it might take as much as a decade to produce the kinds of targeted therapies envisioned by Dr. Price, he said the rapid assays, or tests, TGen is developing should be ready soon. They should enable physicians to detect specific organisms in less than 4 hours, instead of waiting as long as a week under current technologies.

Today, a portion of Dr. Price’s work has come full circle with his childhood and memories of his father. A recently begun project involves the study of bacteria on the wounds of patients at the same burn center established by his father, where burn center collaborators Kevin Foster, Melissa Pressman and Karen Richey join him to eliminate the guesswork, and determine – definitively – what each patient is infected with.

“It’s a huge health problem that costs upwards of $5 billion annually,” said Price.

If successful, Price would view it as a fitting tribute to his father and an enduring legacy to burn victims everywhere.