Greater Charlotte

The Greater Charlotte region is home to more than two dozen bioscience companies providing high-paying jobs in a variety of fields including nutrition studies, nanotechnology, bioinformatics and computational biology. The region also has the state’s largest concentration of biomedical device companies.

Nanotechnology – the manipulation of matter on an ultra-small scale – just might be the next big thing in the Greater Charlotte region.

Researchers including Ken Gonsalves and Wade Sisk of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and Craig Halberstadt and Qi Lu, both of Carolinas Medical Center, are working to create new medical treatments using man-made materials about 1,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair.

Nanotechnology isn’t the only game in town and gown, however. Bioinformatics, the storage, retrieval and analysis of large amounts of biological data, is also a dynamic area of research, along with biomedical engineering.

In the last decade UNC-Charlotte has spun off 26 start-up companies, received 53 patents and transferred 79 technologies to industry, with much of that activity in, or impacting, the biosciences.

North Carolina Research Campus

That tradition of applied science is expected to play an important role in the new North Carolina Research Campus in Kannapolis, north of Charlotte.

David Murdock, owner of Dole Food Co., announced ambitious plans in 2005 for a 350-acre research campus intended to bring investments of $1.5 billion, create 5,000 technology jobs and 30,000 supporting jobs, and attract 100 biotechnology companies.

The project would be the largest biotech development in state history and one of the largest nationwide – the result of a partnership with the UNC and Community College systems and Duke University.