June 10, 2024
When he’s not cycling around Chapel Hill and exploring all that North Carolina has to offer, Ethan Kreutzer can be found studying at the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy as part of his Globalization of Pharmaceutics Education Network (GPEN) travel fellowship.
The purpose of the fellowship, also known as The Ronald T. and Pamela K. Borchardt Travel Fellowship, is to provide an international experience for graduate students where they can learn something new to enhance their research between GPEN institutions.
“In addition to learning something new, I think the opportunity to travel to another country and another institution to see how science is conducted and to build collaborations was appealing to me,” said Kreutzer, third-year Ph.D. candidate at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.
Kreutzer completed his Bachelor of Pharmacy (Hons)/Master of Pharmacy from Monash and became a registered pharmacist working in the hospital sector in Melbourne. He was always interested in pursuing a Ph.D. but valued practical clinical experience.
“I had experience working one-on-one and face-to-face with patients, but I wanted to make an impact on a broader scale in the neurodegenerative disease space, like Alzheimer’s disease, since that was my interest as a practicing pharmacist as well,” he said.
His desire to impact the patients he was serving on a research level led to his Ph.D. research topic surrounding contributing factors to Alzheimer’s disease. His work is very transporter focused, looking at the levels of drug transporters in the brain and whether those levels of transporters change based on interventions that he applies.
“I’ve been looking at microglia cells in the brain, which are the resident immune cells of the central nervous system and involved in neuroinflammation in diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease” he said. “Specifically, I’m studying whether inflammation changes the drug transporters on these microglial cells and whether certain therapeutics restore or reverse those changes caused by inflammation.”
While at Carolina, he has been part of the Brouwer Lab led by Kim Brouwer, Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Education and the William R. Kenan Jr. Distinguished Professor in the Division of Pharmacotherapy and Experimental Therapeutics. Her lab is also transporter focused, and Kreutzer has been able to apply the proteomic methods her lab has already developed and apply it to the brain for his research.
“I find that when you have more people inputting into your work, the output is that much better because you have more people giving critical opinions and offering advice,” he said. “It’s an invaluable experience.”
Kreutzer will share his research in a poster presentation, which incorporates his work at Monash and his recent developments from his time at Carolina, during PharmAlliance week. Because of this global experience, he is interested in applying his skills in an international capacity in the future.
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