Anything is possible at Carolina.
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Organ transplants require a compatible match and organs can be rejected if there is a poor fit between a donor and recipient. What many don’t realize is how complex the matching process is. The undertaking is work-intensive with critical timing, depending on how long the organ can remain preserved outside the body.
Lindsey James came to Carolina to get her PhD in 2005 and never left.
Eighteen years later the chemist runs a lab in the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy exploring medicinal chemistry and epigenetics with the goal of making strides in cancer care and treatment. It’s a method of research defined as translational — bridging the gap between promising early-stage science and the development of products and services that benefit society.
James and her team develop small molecules that target specific proteins believed to play roles in the development of cancers. These small-molecule tools could be useful against an array of cancers.
The continuous development of new molecules requires funding and resources. This part of project development diverts time and energy from conducting the research itself. Grant writing and editing along with back-and-forth communications with funding agencies can take months, even years.
James has found great success in internal Carolina grants, built to reduce the struggle in obtaining funds to advance research. She has secured funding and support from multiple other research translation resources at Carolina, all the while receiving support and guidance from AdvanTx, an initiative to advance therapeutics research from the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research.
While James currently has two major National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants that sustain her work, these additional Carolina resources have given her a break from applying for more federal funding.
“The research space I’m in is competitive,” James said. “I was worried that if I only focused on securing NIH funding then I may lose my window of discovery because it takes a long time for NIH grants to get reviewed, approved and funded.”
Organizational experts at UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School emphasize four pillars of teamwork: identification with group and mission, trust, distributed expertise and shared leadership.
Building these pillars takes time and lots of positive interactions as a team. For the staff of the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center, also known as DigitalNC, that means dedication to their mission as well as time for taste-testing Oreos and sharing pet photos. The team — eight University Libraries employees in the Wilson Special Collections Library in Chapel Hill plus three Elizabeth City State University employees in a satellite office — are there for the work and for each other.
They work hard to preserve the state’s heritage. They have digitized more than 630,000 newspapers, yearbooks, photos and other items from 320 partners in all 100 counties. Nearly half a million people visited the online DigitalNC archive last year alone.
“It’s such a great team,” said Kristen Merryman, digital projects librarian. “You can be transparent about what’s going on, and you know you’re going to receive empathy and support.”
That mutual respect radiates out to the center’s relationship with its partners statewide, team members said. In April, the Office of the Provost recognized their partnership with the State Library of North Carolina with an Engaged Scholarship Award.
Nominator Judy Panitch, director of library communications, praised the staff’s generosity, openness and inclusion. “No partner is too small; no document too minor; no user unimportant,” she wrote. “NCDHC’s values include the belief that ‘community history and culture have the power to enrich the lives of all North Carolinians.’ Every aspect of the program enables and promotes these encounters.”
“Our mission is to support cultural heritage organizations around the state in their goals for access to their collections,” said Lisa Gregory, the program coordinator who supervises the team. “Everyone who works for the center has a passion for access to information and the cultural heritage mission. That helps make us a strong team.”
In adult human brains, the hippocampus generates new neurons (adult-born neurons, or ABNs) throughout life, helping us maintain memories and regulate emotions. Scientists call this process “adult hippocampus neurogenesis.” In people with Alzheimer’s disease, this process is impaired, leading to reduced production of ABNs with poorer qualities.
Given that Alzheimer’s patients often develop both cognitive symptoms (such as memory loss) and non-cognitive symptoms (such as anxiety and depression) for which new neuron generation plays a critical role, one way to help Alzheimer’s patients achieve symptom relief could be to restore this function.
Published in the journal Cell Stem Cell, research from UNC School of Medicine scientists demonstrated that stimulating a brain region called the supramammillary nucleus effectively enhanced adult-born neurons in the otherwise impaired Alzheimer’s brains of mice.
After patterned stimulation of the supramammillary nucleus, Alzheimer’s brains developed more ABNs with improved qualities. Importantly, activation of these ABNs restored both cognitive and affective deficits in the mouse models.
“Ultimately, the hope is to develop first-in-class, highly targeted therapies to treat AD and related dementia,” said senior author Juan Song, PhD, associate professor of pharmacology and Jeffrey Houpt Distinguished Investigator at the UNC School of Medicine.
