Tony Hickey, PhD

Professor
Division of Molecular Pharmaceutics

Research Interests

Microparticulate drug delivery systems; pharmaceutical aerosols

Tony Hickey, PhD, likes big problems, ones on which nobody has shed too much light.

“There are certainly things that are low-hanging fruits, where ninety percent of it is known and if you do the other ten percent, you are there,” he says. “That sort of things doesn’t appeal to me very much.”

What does appeal to him is aerosol drug delivery, and one of the problems he is tackling in that field is the kind he likes—intractable.

Hickey, a professor in the Division of Molecular Pharmaceutics at the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy, is studying the fundamental forces that affect the behavior of powders used in aerosol drug delivery and trying to come up with predictive models for how particular forces contribute to the overall powder behavior.

If he is successful, it could be a big step in improving the development of dry-powder inhalers.

“You would be able to say from first principles or knowledge of the powder how it would behave and then factor that into your thinking for device performance, so you can skip all the characterization steps,” Hickey says.

Such an approach would guarantee quality and performance of dry-powder inhalers and put their development in line with the Food and Drug Administration’s emphasis on quality-by-design, lowering the regulatory barrier for an aerosol product.

“Rather than constantly measuring some property of your product that reflects quality, what you do is you know what factors influence quality, and you design those into the product,” Hickey says. “And then if you measure it, you are measuring it as a check; you’re not measuring it because you expect anything to be wrong with it.

“That’s what this is about: Understanding at the very beginning what you are doing, and then designing your product so that it will always be a quality product that performs the way it’s supposed to. That historically hasn’t been the case with a lot of pharmaceutical products.”

Hickey is quick to emphasize that he has a long way to go and that it isn’t yet clear whether what he is attempting is even possible. Only a handful of scientists worldwide are studying this problem, and it is so daunting that, in Hickey’s words, “it requires pretty much giving up your career to resolve it.”

And that suits him just fine.

“If you aim high and you miss, you hopefully still succeed in some ways,” he says. “If you aim low and you miss, then what’ve you got?”

Unlike many of the other scientists working on the problem, this issue isn’t the sole focus of Hickey’s work. He is involved in an array of ventures in academia and industry centered around pulmonary drug delivery. His lab has worked with a variety of collaborators, including Harvard, Duke, and Texas A&M. He also is working with Medicine in Need, a nonprofit organization focused on developing a new technology to deliver tuberculosis drugs through an inhaler. In addition, Hickey has cofounded two pharmaceutical companies.

“It’s reaching a point now where it’s really hard for me to describe in one word what I do anymore,” Hickey says.

Click on the images below to read more about various aspects of Hickey's work: