Science Market Update

Duke Medical Plaza in Orange County, North Carolina, recently opened its doors for the first time. The medical center includes 25,000 square feet of office space and contains Duke Primary Care Hillsborough, North Carolina Orthopaedic Clinic, and Duke Physical and Occupational Therapy at its South Churton Street location. The new center held an open house after they opened, and when visitors learned of Duke Primary Care’s previous location on Meadowland Drive, many said they never knew Duke had a clinic in the Orange County seat.

Research scientists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have discovered a “spray-on skin” treatment that speeds up recovery in wounds that don’t heal well on their own. The findings, published in the Lancet, showed that ulcers treated with the spray healed better than ulcers treated in other ways. According to WRAL.com, between one and two million Americans have a vein disease where leg wounds have difficulty healing. People with such wounds are at risk for infections and even amputation.

With "life sciences" and "physical sciences" occupying distinct areas of thought within science as a whole, it is sometimes easy to forget the ways in which they inform each other. Not so at North Carolina State University, where researchers from the Department of Physics have solved a key puzzle for Parkinson's Disease research.

The project, undertaken with funding assistance from the National Science Foundation and the United States Department of Energy, sought to explain how copper interacts with a key protein to cause misfolding in Parkinson's patients, thought to be a crucial element in the development of the disease. While researchers have long established the link between copper and misfolding, Frisco Rose, Ph.D. candidate at NCSU and lead author of the corresponding paper, explained, "We didn't have a model for what was happening on the molecular level...we wanted to find the specific binding process that leads to misfolding."