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C&M Physiology meets with The Hamner Institutes for Health Sciences

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April 2008

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Physiology’s Dr. James Faber (at right) speaks with Dr. William Greenlee (center), President and CEO of The Hamner Institutes, and Dr. Charles Hamner (left), Chairman of the Hamner’s Board of Trustees.

Cell and Molecular Physiology department faculty met with researchers and administrators at The Hamner Institutes for Health Sciences in RTP to learn about respective programs and begin discussions about possible new collaborations.

Our faculty represented the first group to meet following the establishment of a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between The Hamner and UNC schools of medicine, public health, and pharmacy as well as the Kenan-Flagler Business School.

The Hamner’s focus on reproductive and developmental biology and respiratory biology aligns with the work of several faculty members here in Physiology. The Hamner has “adopted systems biology as a guiding research paradigm,” which relates back to the fundamentals of physiology, as is described on their website:

In a sense, contemporary systems biology is a renaissance of physiology, a traditional integrative discipline. Biological research has enjoyed decades of success in dissecting the structures and functions of individual molecular and cellular components comprising an organism. However, the inherent complexity of biological systems, due not only to the large number of their constituents, but also to the intricate web of interactions between these constituents, have proven difficult to understand with reductionist approaches. Research has to be conducted at a more global, systems-level in order to gain understanding of the overall behavior of the biological networks that maintain normal physiology and the perturbations in these networks that lead to toxicity and disease.

Read The Hamner’s press release here [pdf].

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