University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

THE UNIVERSITY OF North Carolina is a 17-cam—pus system that includes all 16 public four—year universities in North Carolina and one public residential high school. Although the system's board of governors oversees general system policy, each campus executes a large degree of autonomy from the system and is classified as a separate institution. The system has a total enrollment of over 183,000 students and confers over 75 percent of all bachelor's degrees in North Carolina.

The University of North Carolina was founded in 1789 in Chapel Hill. This was the first public university in the United States to award degrees and the only campus of the University of North Carolina for 136 years.

In 1877, the state of North Carolina began sponsoring additional higher education institutions. In 1971, North Carolina passed legislation bringing into the University of North Carolina all 16 public institutions that confer bachelor's degrees. This round of consolidation granted each constituent institution a chancellor and a board of trustees.

In October 2007, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was given, “for their discoveries of principles for introducing specific gene modifications in mice by the use of embryonic stem cells,” to Dr. Oliver Smithies, professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine, Mario R. Capecchi of the University of Utah's Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and Sir Martin J. Evans of the United Kingdom.

Throughout his career, Smithies' innovations have revolutionized genetic research. Smithies greatly improved a process of separating proteins to identify genes using starch in the 1950s. The process is called gel electrophoresis and has become a laboratory standard.

Smithies codiscovered a technique to introduce DNA material into cells at the University of Wisconsin at Madison in the 1980s. This process replicated the natural process that is called homologous DNA recombination. Smithies approach was that genetic disorders might be treatable by correcting mutations in either bone marrow cells or in stem cells. This is referred to as gene targeting, which led to the creation of transgenic mice, or “designer mice.” In these mice, human diseases could be replicated.

The research in Smithies' lab produced the first animal model of cystic fibrosis, which is caused by defective genes. Their research also studied many diseases including atherosclerosis and high blood pressure.

Two research studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill identify key genes involved in blood vessel development. These reports were published in Molecular and Cellular Biology. Dr. Cam Patterson, professor of medicine and director of the Carolina Cardiovascular Biology Center, led both studies.

The research in both cases was centered on angiogenesis, the molecular program by which endothelial cells lining blood vessels develop or differentiate from their precursor stem cells.

One gene study report deals with the molecular process that prevents a particular cell type from overrunning the developing embryo. The study team discovered a gene they called BMPER for BMP—binding endothelial precursor—derived regulator. This breakthrough could lead to new treatments aimed at slowing or stopping disorders that have vascular growth components, such as blood vessels in the development of tumors, or possibly in diabetes. The other report focuses on what activates the endothelial cell program. It [Page 589]states that a possible answer may have been found in a single protein. This is a protein called HOXB5, a known transcription factor that has never been characterized functionally. The findings indicate HOXB5 not only increases expression of the regulatory protein, but also increases the number of endothelial cells that will form.

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