March 6, 2015
Akinyemi Oni-Orisan, PharmD, and Kevin Watt, MD, have been awarded a 2015 Presidential Trainee Award from the American Society for Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics.
Oni-Orisan and Watt are PhD candidates in the Division of Pharmacotherapy and Experimental Therapeutics at the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
The award is given to clinical pharmacologists in training that submit the most impressive research abstract each year. Only twenty-two awardees are selected out of more than 200 submissions.
Oni-Orisan and Watt were recognized at the ASCPT Annual Meeting March 3–7 in New Orleans.
A New Path to a Healthier Heart
Oni-Orisan’s research investigates the role of a metabolic pathway potentially linked to coronary artery disease. The pathway converts arachidonic acid into epoxyeicosanoids, which have a potent anti-inflammatory effect on the body.
A person with a deficiency in the pathway may be at an increased risk for coronary artery disease, Oni-Orisan says.
“The first step of this research is to establish a link between the pathway and coronary artery disease, but the end goal is to help develop a drug that can specifically target this pathway,” he says. “The concept is that if we can reverse the lowered epoxyeicosanoid levels caused by the deficiency then we can treat coronary artery disease.”
Oni-Orisan took 162 patients with a coronary artery disease and determined their epoxyeicosanoid levels. He found that patients with the lower levels of EET had more severe cases of coronary artery disease.
Oni-Orisan says that this data is both exciting and encouraging for the concept of this pathway as a drug target for coronary artery disease.
His research is supported by an American Heart Association fellowship, the UNC Royster Society of Fellows and the National Institute of Health. His faculty adviser is Associate Professor Craig Lee, PharmD, PhD.
ECMO Complications
Watt researched dosing complications that can arise when using an extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, or ECMO, machine, which is a heart-lung bypass machine used to support very critically ill children.
The machine can remove medicine from the blood that is circulating through it and distort drug concentrations. Watt wanted to find which component of the machine is responsible for this extraction, he says.
“For some drugs, you won’t know that you have the wrong doses until major complications arise, so I wanted to look at this relationship between the drugs and the machine,” Watt says.
Watt added drugs used to treat fungal infections to blood and circulated the blood in the machine in a closed loop. He removed different parts of the machine in several different trials to see how the drug levels in the blood were affected.
While his research is ongoing, he says he found that the antifungal medication micafungin was attracted to a component called a hemofilter, which acts like a kidney to filter blood. There were no alterations in drug concentrations when the hemofilter was removed, Watt says.
“The next steps in this research are to understand why some drugs interact with the circuit and to determine the optimal doses to use in children supported with ECMO,” he says.
Watt’s research is supported by the National Institute of Health. His faculty adviser is Kenan Distinguished Professor Kim Brouwer, PharmD, PhD.
By Aren Besson
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