Lai has received a Career Award from the National Science Foundation, the NSF’s most prestigious award for the development of junior faculty. The five-year, $400,000 award will support his research into stopping pathogens in the body’s mucous membranes. He will also be part of several educational efforts, including working with a precollege science-education program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to develop a curriculum to teach middle and high school students about the health functions of mucus.
Most infections do not begin in the blood or enter through undamaged skin. Instead, they are transmitted at exposed mucosal surfaces such as the pulmonary, gastrointestinal, and reproductive tracts, Lai says. That makes mucus—the slimy and sticky secretions that line mucosal surfaces—the first line of defense against pathogens such as viruses. Despite the importance of mucous membranes in protecting against foreign substances, Lai says, few people have thought to take advantage of mucus in developing methods to prevent infections.
“In this project, we will explore how the immune system can be tuned to transform mucus into a sticky mesh against diverse pathogens, effectively trapping them in mucus and reducing infections in the process,” he says.
Lai is collaborating with two applied mathematicians—Greg Forest, PhD, and Scott McKinley, PhD—to create models to predict how effectively antibodies can immobilize a wide range of viruses in mucus. Forest is the Grant Dahlstrom Distinguished Professor of Mathematics & Biomedical Engineering in the Department of Mathematics at UNC-Chapel Hill, while McKinley is an assistant professor at the University of Florida.
As part of the project, Lai will work with the DESTINY Traveling Science Learning Program at the Morehead Planetarium and Science Center to develop a curriculum for middle and high school students and teachers. DESTINY works to improve precollege science education in the state by developing and delivering hands-on curricula for students and teachers and providing professional development for teachers. The program has benefited more than 250,000 students and 400 teachers since its inception in 2000.
The team will develop a curriculum that uses simple, hands-on experiments to help explain real-life experiences and discuss the biology, chemistry, and physics illustrated through pathogens and mucus.
“Mucus is the reason why we can blink, eat, digest, reproduce, and breathe without getting sick constantly,” Lai says. “Mucus is a topic that catches the attention of many young students, making it a fun and effective platform to teach important principles in science and research. We hope the experience will help encourage students to pursue careers in science and medicine.”
Additionally, Lai will provide a research-immersion experience in his lab each year for at least one student from the North Carolina School of Science and Math. He will also be working with the UNC PREP program to help prepare students from groups traditionally underrepresented in the sciences for entry and success in top biomedical PhD programs.
]]>The honorees were:
Three student-faculty teams from the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy have been named Walmart Scholars by the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy, marking the sixth consecutive year that the School has had at least one recipient for the award.
The School’s 2012 winners are
The Walmart Scholars Program aims to strengthen the award recipients’ skills and commitment to a career in academic pharmacy through their participation at the AACP Annual Meeting. Each student-faculty pair receives a $1,000 scholarship to help cover registration and travel costs for the meeting, which will be held this year in Kissimmee, Florida, on July 14–18.
Parsons, a third-year PharmD student, served as a teaching assistant in the School’s Pharmaceutical Care Lab during her PY3 year. She has served as president of her class and vice president of the UNC Graduate and Professional Student Federation. She has also been a member of the School’s Curriculum Committee and Academic Calendar Committee, where she provides feedback to faculty regarding course development, review, and redesign. In addition, Parsons has held leadership positions in the School’s chapter of Phi Delta Chi.
Riendeau, a graduate of the School’s PharmD program, is a PGY2 resident in geriatrics at UNC Hospitals and Clinics. At her residency, she works as part of a geriatric interdisciplinary team where she adjusts complex medication regimens, provides education to patients and caregivers, and uses other health-care professionals on the team to provide comprehensive patient care. She has also presented and lectured to pharmacy students and geriatric medicine fellows. She is currently codirecting the Geriatric Pharmacy elective with Ivey Burkhart, her residency director, and helping to precept PY4 students on rotation at her clinical site.
Waitzman, an alumna of the School’s PGY1 Community Pharmacy Residency Program, is the first academic fellow in the Pharmaceutical Care Lab. She has coordinated PCL courses, taught electives, advised student groups, served on the School’s curriculum committee, conducted research, reviewed articles for pharmacy journals, and maintained a clinical practice at UNC Hospitals and Kerr Drug. Her fellowship research project is an evaluation of the top two hundred drug-information exercises used in the PCL to identify the strengths of the current system, as well as areas for improvement. Waitzman has also been an active member of the American Pharmacists Association and the North Carolina Pharmacists Association.
]]>Huang, who is also an Eshelman professor, has been chair of the division since coming to the School in 2005 from the University of Pittsburgh.
“Professor Jay is very highly regarded in the fields of pharmaceutics, drug delivery, and radiopharmaceutics. He also brings considerable administrative experience having directed a unique FDA-registered university-based pharmaceutical manufacturing facility for nine years,” says Bob Blouin, dean of the pharmacy school. “I want to thank Leaf Huang for six years of outstanding leadership and service to the School and to the division. Dr. Huang’s vision of a world-class molecular pharmaceutics division has become a reality, and I fully support his desire to focus now on his research and mentoring programs.”
Jay works at the interface of the pharmaceutical and nuclear sciences. He uses pharmaceutical approaches to solve problems related to nuclear imaging and therapy, and uses radioanalytical approaches to solve problems encountered in the development of novel formulations and drug-delivery systems. A large portion of his most recent work has been devoted to developing a form of diethylene triamine pentaacetic acid, commonly known as DTPA, that can be administered orally and distributed quickly to people affected by a nuclear accident or dirty-bomb attack. DTPA can help clear certain radioactive elements from the human body.
As cofounder of four companies, Jay has also been active as an entrepreneur. Since moving to North Carolina, he launched Capture Pharmaceuticals, Inc. in 2010 with Russ Mumper, PhD, vice dean of the School. Capture develops radionuclide decorporation agents such as DTPA prodrugs. He also cofounded Arcato Laboratories, Inc., in 2011, which focuses on controlled-release topical anesthetics for use in orthodontics.
In 2008 Jay joined the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill after twenty-seven years at the University of Kentucky College of Pharmacy. Prior to that, he was at the University of Connecticut for one and a half years in the Department of Nuclear Medicine. Jay earned a PhD in pharmaceutical sciences from the University of Kentucky and a bachelor of pharmacy from the State University of New York at Buffalo. He is the author of more than 110 peer-reviewed publications and holds six U.S. patents with two more pending.
]]>The contract, which is part of the National Cancer Institute's Chemical Biology Consortium program, will provide more than $843,000 over eighteen months to support research led by William Janzen and Kimryn Rathmell, MD, PhD. Janzen is the director of assay development and compound profiling at the CICBDD, while Rathmell is an associate professor in the UNC School of Medicine. Both are also members of the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center.
Rathmell's laboratory recently identified an enzyme, Ror2, that is expressed in a large subset of renal cell carcinomas. Suppressing Ror2 restricts the ability of renal cancer cells to grow and migrate, Janzen says.
"Our goal in this project is to develop Ror2 inhibitors that will serve as drug leads, with the eventual aim of producing treatments for renal cell carcinoma," he says.
"Renal cell carcinoma remains one of the most difficult cancers to manage in oncology because of its high level of primary resistance to cytotoxic chemotherapies. The disease in the metastatic setting is incurable, and we are in dire need of new, effective treatment options."
The Chemical Biology Consortium program is administered by the National Cancer Institute at Frederick (NCI-Frederick), a government-owned, contract-operated Federally Funded Research and Development Center. SAIC-Frederick is the operations and technical support contractor for NCI-Frederick.
This project has been funded in whole or in part with Federal Funds from the National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health, under Contract No. HHSN261200800001E to SAIC-Frederick, Inc. The content of this publication does not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the Department of Health and Human Services, nor does mention of trade names, commercial products, or organizations imply endorsement by the U.S. Government.
]]>“Dr. Blalock’s research into the behavioral factors that affect the health of individuals has been cited by investigators around the world,” says Bob Blouin, dean of the School. “Her elevation to professor is acknowledgment of her expertise and of her amazing level of commitment to her division, the School, the University, and state in all areas of teaching, research, and service.”
Blalock joined the School’s Division of Pharmaceutical Outcomes and Policy in 2002. Her current work focuses on patient-provider communication concerning medication risks and the evaluation of community-pharmacy-based programs for illness prevention and disease management. Her ongoing projects include
Risk communication and the impact of pharmaceutical care, including patient education and counseling on patient health outcomes, is of particular interest to Blalock. Her past research has focused primarily on the prevention and treatment of rheumatoid arthritis, osteoarthritis, and osteoporosis.
Blalock holds undergraduate and graduate degrees in pharmacy and public health from the University of Michigan. Her PhD is from the Gillings School of Global Public Health at UNC-Chapel Hill, where she serves as an adjunct instructor. She is the author of seven book chapters and seventy peer-reviewed papers.
After receiving her pharmacy degree, Blalock practiced for several years as a community pharmacist before pursuing advanced degrees at Michigan and UNC-Chapel Hill. She held positions with UNC’s Thurston Arthritis Center and as a member of the faculty of the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health and the Long School of Pharmacy and Health Sciences at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California, before joining the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy.
]]>Rodgers is a faculty member in the School’s Division of Pharmacotherapy and Experimental Therapeutics and associate director of the division’s clinical fellowship programs. She is also a clinical pharmacist in the Cardiomyopathy and Cardiac Transplantation Service at UNC Hospitals, where she directs the PGY2 residency in cardiology.
Rodgers currently serves on the American College of Clinical Pharmacy Board of Regents and the Board of Pharmacy Specialties Pharmacotherapy Specialty Council. She is a fellow of the ACCP, as well as a recipient of the Kappa Epsilon Outstanding Adviser Award and the Kappa Epsilon Career Achievement Award.
The National Academies of Practice is composed of ten academies representing various areas of health-care practice. Founded in 1981, the central purpose of NAP is to advise public-policy makers on health-care issues. Only 150 active distinguished practitioners may be elected to each academy.
]]>The subgrant comes from the Medical University of South Carolina College of Nursing’s REACH US: SEA-CEED program. It will fund Steps of Faith, a project that recruits local ministers to help persuade members of the black community to get more diabetes screenings, exercise more, and switch to healthier diets.
The program will focus on heads of households or leaders of families with a history that puts them at risk for diabetes or cardiovascular diseases. The participants will be encouraged to follow a diabetes-management regimen specifically designed for their individual needs. They will also be trained to mentor to other members of their family.
This is the second consecutive year that Emekalam, a faculty member at the School’s Elizabeth City satellite campus, has received the subgrant for the Steps of Faith project.
]]>Weeks will oversee the School’s satellite campus in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, which was created in 2005 in partnership with Elizabeth City State University. She became the ECSU–based director of the UNC/ECSU Doctor of Pharmacy Partnership Program in 2010. She was formerly a clinical assistant professor at the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy and completed a community pharmacy residency at UNC-Chapel Hill.
“Latasha Weeks has been key to the success of our Elizabeth City satellite since she arrived there two years ago,” says Bob Blouin, PharmD, dean of the School. “This promotion recognizes both her past contributions and the pivotal role she will now play in ensuring the quality of our program.”
As assistant dean, Weeks will provide overall leadership to maintain and expand the partnership program and will develop and implement programs and activities that encourage the growth of and support the needs of the students based on the ECSU campus, Blouin says.
The PharmD partnership program with ECSU aims to increase the number of pharmacists and pharmacy faculty practicing in North Carolina, with a particular focus on reaching underserved populations, especially those in the northeastern part of the state. Students based at ECSU receive classroom instructions from faculty at the Chapel Hill site via interactive, real-time video-teleconferencing technology, as well as from faculty in Elizabeth City. Upon completing all degree requirements, the students graduate with a doctor of pharmacy from UNC-Chapel Hill with acknowledgment of the partnership with ECSU. The School also has a satellite campus in Asheville.
Weeks received her doctor of pharmacy from the University of Maryland. She also holds bachelor’s degrees in microbiology and in economics from that institution. As a member of the UMD faculty, she served as pharmacist coordinator for an introductory pharmacy practice experience. Prior to beginning her of her residency at UNC, weeks worked as a clinical account manager with First Health Services Corporation in Owings Mills, Maryland., where she provided clinical and managed-care services to the District of Columbia and Montana Medicaid Programs. She has also practiced as a staff pharmacist with CVS and Walmart in Baltimore, Maryland.
]]>“I am extremely pleased that Phil Rodgers has joined us,” says Bob Blouin, PharmD, dean of the School. “Our relationships with and the quality of our preceptors and community-based faculty are of critical importance to the School. Phil’s experience at Duke AHEC and hospital make him an ideal faculty member to lead our experiential education program.”
Professional Experience Program is a core component of the professional education program. PEP places students with practicing pharmacist preceptors in real-world clinical settings based out of three hubs across North Carolina. Students complete month-long rotations after their first and second years and a nine-month rotation during their fourth year in the PharmD program. The School has twenty-five AHEC- and community-based faculty and approximately 500 pharmacy preceptors in 420 sites across the state.
Rodgers will also hold an appointment as a clinical associate professor in the Division of Pharmacy Practice and Experiential Education.
Rodgers received his bachelor of science in pharmacy and his doctor of pharmacy from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and completed a pharmacy residency in ambulatory care at the Medical College of Virginia Hospitals in Richmond, Virginia. His areas of scholarship and teaching are in primary care pharmacy practice, chronic disease management, and innovative pharmacy education programs. He is a board-certified pharmacotherapy specialist, a clinical pharmacist practitioner, and has been named a fellow of the American College of Clinical Pharmacy.
Before joining the School’s faculty, Rodgers served as a clinical pharmacist and faculty in ambulatory care at Duke University Hospital, where he was a clinical pharmacist practitioner in the areas of diabetes, hypertension, and anticoagulation. Rodgers also served as director for the ASHP-accredited PGY2 Ambulatory Care Pharmacy Residency Program at Duke Hospital for eleven years and as the director of pharmacy education for the Duke Area Health Education Center for nine years. He serves as the American Pharmacists Association representative to the National Diabetes Education Program.
The primary focus of the council is to represent the collective interests of the academic disciplines within pharmacy education to the AACP and its board of directors. Ives’ three-year term will officially begin at the 2012 AACP Annual Meeting, which will be held July 14-18 in Kissimmee, Florida.
Ives, who joined the School in 1981, is a faculty member in the Division of Pharmacy Practice and Experiential Education. He is also a clinical pharmacist practitioner at UNC Hospitals’ Ambulatory Care Center, where he manages the Chronic Pain Clinic within the General Medicine Clinic and serves as a preceptor for fourth-year student pharmacists and ambulatory-care residents.
Within the AACP, Ives has served as chair of the Bylaws and Policy Development Committee and recently served as chair of the Section of Teachers of Pharmacy Practice.
]]>The most characteristic feature of AS is the absence or near absence of speech throughout the person’s life. The disease, often misdiagnosed as cerebral palsy or autism, is caused by mutations or deletions in the Ube3a gene inherited from the mother, or the maternal allele. The Ube3a protein produced by that gene is a key component of an important molecular pathway that helps brain neurons pass electrical or chemical signals to other neurons via the synapse.
There is a paternal Ube3a allele, but whereas both the maternal and paternal alleles are expressed in most body tissues, this gene is dormant in human and rodent neurons.
“We wanted to determine if there could be a way to awaken the dormant allele and restore Ube3a expression in neurons,” says neuroscientist Benjamin D. Philpot, PhD, one of three senior investigators in the study and an associate professor of cell and molecular physiology at the UNC School of Medicine.
In a paper published online December 21 in the journal Nature, the team of UNC scientists, which included researchers from the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy, says it has found a way to awaken the paternal Ube3a allele, opening the door to a potential treatment strategy for AS.
Using a library of FDA-approved drugs, the UNC team discovered that irinotecan, a topoisomerase inhibitor known to be active in the central nervous system, robustly awakened Ube3a in genetically engineered mice. Subsequently, the team found that the medication topotecan and several other topoisomerase inhibitors can also awaken Ube3a.
Importantly, the protein from the awakened paternal Ube3a was functional and was expressed by the gene in amounts comparable to that of normal maternal Ube3a in control animals.
The researchers determined that topotecan awakened the dormant paternal Ube3a allele by reducing antisense RNA, a strand of ribonucleic acid that silences the allele.
The study is “the first example of a drug that regulates antisense RNA and, as a result, regulates protein levels of a coding gene,” says neuroscientist Mark J. Zylka, PhD, one of the study’s senior coauthors and an assistant professor of cell and molecular physiology.
Zylka and Philpot caution against using topoisomerase inhibitors right now to treat AS, given the limits of current knowledge.
“We’d like to stress that these compounds are not ready to be used clinically for Angelman syndrome,” Zylka says. “We don’t know what the off-target effects might be on a gene or genes with similar DNA sequences. We need to figure out optimal concentrations and dosing before we move to clinical trials. And we need to determine which drug is best.”
The other senior coauthor on the study is Bryan Roth, MD, PhD, the Michael Hooker Distinguished Professor of Pharmacology and Translational Proteomics, director of the National Institute of Mental Health Psychoactive Drug Screening Program, and a professor in the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy. Jian Jin, PhD, the associate director of medicinal chemistry at the Center for Integrative Chemical Biology and Drug Discovery, was also on the team of researchers.
Other UNC coauthors are: Hsien-Sung Huang, John A. Allen, Angela M. Mabb, Ian F. King, Jayalakshmi Miriyala, Bonnie Taylor-Blake, Noah Sciaky, J. Walter Dutton Jr., Hyeong-Min Lee, Xin Chen, and Arlene S. Bridges.
The research was supported in part by funds from the Angelman Syndrome Foundation, the Simons Foundation, the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Eye Institute, the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, the NIMH Psychoactive Drug Screening Program, and the NC TraCS Institute funded by the NIH Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSA).
]]>Wiltshire joined the School’s Division of Pharmacotherapy and Experimental Therapeutics in 2007. He serves as the associate director of the UNC Institute for Pharmacogenomics and Individualized Therapy. He also holds adjunct faculty positions in the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center and in the Department of Genetics at the UNC School of Medicine. In addition, he is actively involved in several collaborations with the Hamner Institutes for Health Sciences.
Before coming to UNC, Wiltshire was a senior research investigator at the Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation. Before that, he spent eleven years as a high school biology teacher in New Zealand before changing direction and going into research.
Wiltshire studies drug reactions using mouse models with different genetic makeups. His current focus is on anxiety and depression and the medications used to treat them. His work is being supported by a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health.
“Dr. Wiltshire has made valuable contributions to the School since he joined us four years ago,” says Bob Blouin, PharmD, dean of the School. “His work covers an important area in our quest to match medicines with the unique genetic makeup of the people who need them.”
Wiltshire is a member of the American Association for Advancement of Science and the American Society of Human Genetics, and an elected member of the Nominations committee of the International Mouse Genome Society. He is the author of more than seventy publications in refereed journals and more than thirty books and book chapters. In 2009 he received a best-paper award from the Society of Toxicology for a publication in Genome Research.
]]>“In the past thirty years, AIDS has gone from being a death sentence to a manageable condition to being only a few years away from a cure. Dr. Kashuba has been a major contributor to the effort that has made this possible and a leader here at the School,” says Dean Bob Blouin, PharmD.
Kashuba is a member of the Division of Pharmacotherapy and Experimental Therapeutics, director of the UNC Center for AIDS Research Clinical Pharmacology and Analytical Chemistry Core, and director of the Pharmacology Core for the $32 million UNC Delaney Collaboratory Cure AIDS Project. She has also been recently awarded a U01 grant from NIAID—the first ever to a PharmD—worth nearly $2.2 million and a $500,000 shared instrumentation grant from NCRR. She is also a collaborator on a $3 million R01 using the humanized mouse model to develop next-generation HIV prevention.
Kashuba's research focuses on the clinical pharmacology of antiretroviral agents used in the treatment of HIV infection. Specifically, she is investigating the role of antiretroviral therapy in preventing the transmission of HIV, determining optimal dosing and drug combinations for the treatment of HIV infection, understanding and predicting drug-drug and drug-cytokine interactions and adverse effects, and role of gender and ethnicity in drug disposition. Her innovative methods and approach to drug development have resulted in her being named chair of the HIV Pharmacology Best Practices Working Group within the NIAID, Division of AIDS.
Kashuba is a reviewer for sixteen journals and author of a dozen book chapters and nearly a hundred peer-reviewed publications earned her BS in pharmacy from the University of Toronto and her PharmD from the State University of New York at Buffalo and spent time as a clinical hospital pharmacist before completing a pharmacology fellowship at the Clinical Pharmacology Research Center at Bassett Healthcare in Cooperstown, New York. She joined the School in 1997 as an assistant professor.
]]>The one-year grant will provide $50,000 to support Ming’s study of a therapy targeting αvβ6 integrin receptors that play a crucial role in fibrogenesis, the formation of scar tissues in an organ. Ming, a faculty member in the Division of Molecular Pharmaceutics, will use this study to generate preliminary data to apply for an R01 grant from the National Institutes of Health.
When fibrosis occurs in renal tubules, αvβ6 integrin receptors are induced and transported to the cell surface, worsening the disease. Ming will attach anti-integrin siRNA and the integrin ligand to a protein carrier. These nanoparticles will bind to the integrin at sites of renal fibrosis, delivering the siRNA to the kidney cells to bring the integrin level back to normal and thereby treat fibrosis.
Ming's research could help advance targeted therapeutics for kidney diseases and provide approaches to antifibrotic strategies for diseases in other organs.
“This project is highly innovative in that it will be the first targeted RNAi strategy for treating kidney diseases,” he says. “It will combine the strengths of highly specific siRNAs and disease-targeted delivery systems to address the challenge of low specificity confronting current antifibrotic therapeutics.”
There is increasing demand for effective therapies for chronic kidney diseases as these diseases have become a major source of morbidity and mortality, and there are currently no approved therapies aimed at treating fibrosis, Ming says.
“Treatment for chronic kidney diseases have been focused on end-stage renal disease, when renal failure has already developed, making dialysis or kidney transplant necessary,” he says. “This produces a serious economic burden for health-care systems and generates enormous demands for treatments at the early stages.”
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