Duke-UNC brings collaboration, too

When the Duke’s men’s basketball team travels to the Dean E. Smith Center on Saturday evening, it will be walking into a raucous, hostile arena created by decades of rivalry.

But off the court and outside the Dean Dome, University of North Carolina and Duke researchers are teaming up in science labs and have their eyes set on making key medical advancements.

They put the longstanding rivalry on the backburner. Well, most of the time.

“If Duke loses, I’ll be very happy — and I’ll probably give John a hard time about it,” admitted Scott Magness, a UNC-Chapel Hill researcher specializing in stem cells and bioengineered tissue scaffolds. His research partner, John Rawls, works at Duke.

Magness and Rawls are among the eight researchers from the two universities currently teaming up on projects through collaborative grants from the North Carolina Translational and Clinical Sciences (NC TraCS) Institute and the Duke University Translational Medical Institute (DTMI). For the next year, the Carolina and Duke scientists will combine resources and expertise to tackle problems impacting human health.

“There’s excellent science happening at UNC and at Duke,” said Martina Gentzsch, a cystic fibrosis expert from the University of North Carolina. “If this comes together, remarkable scientific discoveries may emerge.”

The year-long grants of $50,000 include work on heart disease, genome editing, the human intestinal lining and premature infants:

• Collaborating with Duke cardiovascular researcher Dawn Bowles, Gentzsch is bringing her knowledge of how defects in the cystic fibrosis transmembrane regulator gene —which causes the disease — affect the lungs and applying that information to the heart.

“We have extensive knowledge on CFTR in the lungs, but we don’t know much at all about CFTR in the heart,” she said. “The members of this group at Duke are specialists in heart disease and they have a repository with a tremendous amount of hearts available for our studies.”

Bowles is the co-director of the Duke Human Heart Repository, which consists of 500 hearts and 40,000 specimens, and supplies the two with the resources necessary to conduct their research.

(Click here for more information on the research project.)

• Magness and Rawls are applying the translational grant to determine how bacteria affect the human gut. Magness is using his expertise in intestinal stem cell research to essentially build small guts, while Rawls will apply his homegrown bacteria to the miniature organs.

“We’re basically rebuilding mini human intestines in a dish,” Magness said. “Then we’re studying how different bacteria impact absorption of nutrients.”

• Carolina’s Daniel Gonzalez of the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy and Duke School of Medicine’s Christoph Hornik are working together to predict drug safety for premature infants.

The researchers are gathering extensive clinical data from a database of pediatric electronic medical records and running it through a model, which shows how the disposition of the drug changes over time. The model takes age, weight, gender and ethnicity into account to show the most accurate image of how the drugs are processed.

(Click here for more information on the research project.)

• In an effort to develop gene therapy for Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy — a rapidly worsening form of muscular dystrophy — Aravind Asokan, a gene therapy researcher from Carolina, is teaming with Duke’s biomedical engineer Charles Gersbach.

By bringing together Gersbach’s background in genome editing and Asokan’s expertise in gene delivery, the pair is hoping to modify DNA sequences to correct disease-causing mutations.

Combining the resources of two major research facilities, Bowles said, helps scientists make significant advances, making the partnership an ideal situation for the researchers.

“When you think about basketball, you always think of North Carolina because of the presence of two phenomenal teams,” Bowles said. “When you think of national science, you think of Duke and UNC — they go hand-in-hand. The two strong basketball teams with strong scientific universities compliment the entire area.”

Even with all efforts going toward the advancement of science, the rivalry between Duke and Carolina is still strong even in the labs and a win won’t go unmentioned — even for people who don’t watch any other game during the season.

“The whole institute roots for UNC and it’s pretty intense,” Gentzsch said. “Everyone gets sucked in.”

The collaborative projects are the subject of an ongoing series by the North Carolina Translational and Clinical Sciences Institute — the home of the NIH Clinical and Translational Science Awards at UNC-Chapel Hill.

To read more about each project as they are published, click here.

By Brandon Bieltz, Office of Communications and Public Affairs